Cloud Hosting

The dawn of cloud computing has proven to be an essential event in this digital era. Having an on-site data centre is not a necessity now. It has led to substantial cost savings and improved agility for organizations.

A newmodel of business has emerged called the Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) model. Here athird-party service provider takes care of providing hosting, maintaining coreinfrastructure which includes hardware, software, storage and servers for thecustomer.

Techbehemoths like Amazon, Microsoft and Google, have plunged into the market ofIaaS and have upped the ante. These three bigwigs have addressed the datasovereignty and security concerns which thwarted the growth of cloud servicesin its initial days. The market size for IaaS is estimated to be around $32.4billion in 2018, which was a growth of 31.3% from 2017.

Amazon has traditionally dominated the market for IaaS, but Microsoft and Google are quickly gaining ground. While the new CEO Satya Nadella has ushered Microsoft into a Cloud first era, Google is not much behind in the race with its GCP(Google cloud platform). Alphabet, Googles parent company has spent $ 6 billion on R&D in the fourth quarter of 2018. Which is a 40% increase YOY, most of the spending was on future technologies like cloud and AI.

Microsofthas increased prices of its on-site only office 2019 packages by 10%,announcing a clear push towards the cloud strategy.

With competition rife amongst the Big Threeof the cloud computing world, customers are bound to benefit. In this article,we shall compare the three cloud services provided by Microsoft, Amazon, andGoogle.

Theleading computing service of the Amazon web services framework is the amazonelastic compute cloud. The database administrators can optimize for costs usingthe ECC with other Amazon web services which promote the right amount offlexibility and compatibility. The ECC platform could be scaled up or scaleddown within minutes allowing the administrators to optimize their resources.The ECC allows the administrators to deploy thousands of server instancesimmediately.

Amazongives you the power of machine learning using its AWS auto-scaling monitor. Themonitor continually monitors your current requirements and adjusts its capacityaccordingly, without increasing the price. Amazon guarantees 99.99% serviceavailability as a part of their service level agreement(SLA).

Apartfrom this, Amazon offers Amazon Elastic Container service, which supportsDocker containers. With this feature, you could manage the IP address of yourwebsite, access security groups, Cloudtrail logs, Cloudwatch events and Querythe state of your application.

A network of virtualmachines powers the Azure computing feature, which includes development, appdeployment, datacenter extensions, and testing. The Microsoft Azure iscompatible with Windows, SQL, SAP, Oracle and Linux. Azure offers a hybridmodel consisting of an on-premise data centre and a public cloud.

A serverless containersystem called the Azure Kubernetes Service(AKS) allows containerizedapplications which can be deployed and managed faster. The AKS allows forcontinuous delivery and continuous integration experience. It will enable variousteams working in a virtual office to work on a single platform.

Amazon is ahead in the race forintegrating IoT and AI into the cloud. Amazons lex interface allows you to usethe same technology which has is used in its groundbreaking voice assistantAlexa. Amazon even allows you to use the power of Sagemaker, and you can use itfor deploying machine learning and for staff training. Amazons Lambdaserverless environment is a boon for companies which who wish to completelyuntether themselves and deploy their apps from Amazons serverlessinfrastructure.

In 2015 Amazon launched itsmachine learning service, which helps developers in creating machine learningmodels. One year later, Amazon launched services like AWS Rekognition andPolly.

Microsoft has its own resource formachine learning called the Microsoft Azure Machine learning studio. Thebenefit of Azure Machine learning studio is that it allows the developers touse complex machine learning models through a simple graphical UI.

Storage is one of the criticalfunctions of any cloud service. Both Azure and AWS have excellent storagecapabilities, with both service providers giving necessary facilities like RESTAPI and server-side data encryption. Blob storage is the name given by Azure toits storage mechanism while the storage mechanism of AWS is called S3(simplestorage service). Automatic replication across various regions and highavailability are the characteristics of the AWS storage solution. Both AWS andAzure use the block-storage function. In the block-storage service, the data isdivided into small, equally sized pieces of data called blocks. This allows forfaster access to the data. Amainfrastructurezon EBS(elastic block storage) isthe block storage service of AWS, which acts as a primary storage device forAmazon EC2. While there are Azure virtual disks which connect to the AzureVirtual Machines using block storage.

Both AWS and Azure provide youwith high availability through replication of your VM files to variousdifferent zones. In case your VM is damaged it is replicated quickly. AWS even givesyou the option of taking snapshots of the VM to use them as backups at an extrafee.

Azure provides you with the optionof launching your own operating system using a VHD file. You can upload the VHDfile to a blob and launch it as a VM. The thing is that once you delete your VMin Azure, the uploaded VHD file also becomes unusable. This is not the casewith AWS.

Hybrid cloud is a strategy in which companies choose to use a combination of different infrastructure environments like public cloud service providers and on-site servers. This approach is taken by companies who cannot afford to use 100% cloud infrastructure due to data residency concerns for e.g.:- banks.

Microsoft is well- establishedamongst enterprises as a good option for hybrid cloud infrastructure. ThroughAzure stack, businesses can easily use various Azure cloud service throughtheir own data centre. The azure stack provides you with the freedom ofdeploying your applications either on Azure cloud or on your own datacentrewithout the hassle of rewriting the code.

Using Azure stack, your companycan avail a host of services like virtual machines, networking, storage, loadbalancing, VPN gateway, containers, functions and active directories on yourown datacenters. The hardware support is provided by a lot of vendors likeDell, Cisco, Lenovo, and Huawei. The pricing is flexible, starting at rates aslow as $0.008 per virtual CPU per hour.

AWS launched its own hybridinfrastructure by the name of Outposts in 2018 at reinventing conference. AnAWS Outpost is a fully managed infrastructure service wherein AWS provides aset of pre-configured hardware and software to the on-site location of thecustomer. These racks use the same equipment which powers AWS in all theregions that amazon services. These Outposts can be configured with a varietyof EC2 instances and EBS volume storages. Customers can utilize AWS outposts tolaunch and manage a range of AWS services like ALB for load balancing, ECS, EKS for containersand EMR for big data along with RDS. Outposts allow the customers to use thesame AWS management console, SDK(Software Development Kit) and CLI(Command-LineInterface) tools which AWS provides today.

Pricing acts as a significantdeterminant for those who are considering a move to the cloud infrastructure.With competition rife between various cloud infrastructure providers, thepricing has seen a constant downward trend. If you take a look, the prices areroughly the same, but a detailed comparison is difficult as both offer slightlydifferent pricing models and come up with many special offers and discounts tolure more users.

Both Azure and AWS offer free totry services which let you test the cloud waters, helping you in decidingwhether the cloud is for you.

It helps if there are proven usecases of companies using cloud infrastructure successfully. Being the oldestservice provider in the IaaS sector, AWS is at a clear advantage here withnames such as Netflix, Astrazeneca, Newscorp, Airbnb, Nike, Lonely Planet andPfizer amongst an extensive list of customers who have chosen AWS as theirpreferred partner.

Azure has also got reputedcustomers in its kitty, which includes Ford, NBC News, Easyjet, Pearson,Wallmart, Twitter, Verizon, to name a few.

The choice of the ideal IaaSprovider really depends on your needs, and there is no one-size-fits-allsolution here. Both the solutions are offered by world-renowned companies whoprovide a high-level of security, free look-in services for you to try,excellent support and pay-as-you-use pricing.

AWS will suit your company if youwant to go with a company which has the highest experience with cloud. AWS alsohas a more significant global reach than Azure. AWS offers better flexibilityand a more comprehensive range of services than Azure. AWS is especiallycos-effective and suitable if you are a large organization.

Azure will prove to be a good fitfor companies who have most of their apps and platforms on Microsoft productslike Windows and if you are a startup who is migrating to cloud for the firsttime.

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The Cloud infrastructure race who is better: AWS or Azure? - TechiExpert.com