Cloud computing has dramatically changed the way businesses function. It enables enterprises to accelerate towards a new technological era, allowing them to drive business productivity, innovation and cost effectiveness. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) are the major cloud service providers (CSPs) overwhelmingly dominating the global cloud market.
Today most of the businesses are moving towards multicloud adoptions to leverage benefits like decreased CapEx, reduced infrastructure maintenance, increased agility, availability, and scalability.
AWS, Azure, and GCP, the big 3 CSP’s possess the experience and knowledge to provide a dependable and feature-rich cloud platform. However, before choosing a specific provider, a due diligence must be carried out thoroughly, to compare and understand the services, capabilities and differences offered by each of these platforms. This helps enterprises in aligning their business objectives with their cloud strategies. Let us deep dive into understanding the top services offered by cloud service providers that will help businesses create a future-fit generation of products and services.
Top AWS Cloud Services
- Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud )is an on demand cloud service with the objective of providing virtual servers to manage workloads irrespective of their size. Businesses no longer need to worry about investing in expensive physical servers to develop and deploy applications faster. It also offers other server management features like storage and security.
- Amazon RDS
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is a managed database service facilitating creation of dedicated database instances. Amazon RDS supports various database engines for storing and organizing your data. It also helps with relational database administration tasks such as data migration, backup, restore, and patching.
- AmazonS3
Amazon S3 stands for Simple Storage Service that provides low-cost object storage services. S3 can be used to store files for website, enterprises, mobile apps, backup and restore. It offers data availability, scalability, performance, and security while intelligently distributing data across multiple physical regions and also integrates with PCI-DSS, HIPAA/HITECH, FedRAMP, etc. so data is never compromised.
- AWS Glue
AWS Glue is a serverless data integration service and a fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that easily and cost-effectively processes, enriches, and migrates data between disparate data stores and data streams. Data engineers can use AWS Glue Interactive Sessions to interactively analyze and process data. A data engineer can visually design, execute, and monitor their ETL workflow in AWS Glue Studio with just a few clicks.
- AWS CloudWatch
AWS CloudWatch is a cloud monitoring service enabling users to consolidate systems, applications and AWS service logs into a single, highly scalable service. Data engineers can see logs for services they run in CloudWatch as well as maintain error logs during the development phase. CloudWatch Events can be used to schedule services i.e; start a service in specific time windows.
- Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift is a petabyte-scale data warehouse service that enables users to gain new customer and business insights by using data from here. With Redshift Serverless, data engineers can gain insights by simply importing it into a data warehouse and running queries. Additionally, engineers can use Query Editor v2 to create schemas and tables, visually import data, and explore database objects as well.
- Amazon EKS
Amazon Elastic for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) is a container management service that simplifies deploying, managing, and scaling containerized applications using Kubernetes on AWS. The EKS service uses Kubernetes to automatically manage and scale clusters of infrastructure resources on AWS. Amazon EKS enables organizations to leverage Kubernetes without installing, operating, or managing container orchestration software.
- Amazon DynamoDB
Amazon DynamoDB is a NOSQL (nonrelational) database service that offers solutions by using multiple data types such as documents, charts, key-value, storage, and search. DynamoDB has built-in security with a fully managed, durable, multi-master, multi-region database and in-memory archive for web-scale applications. It incorporates the tools used to generate actionable insights, useful analytics, and traffic trend monitoring.
- AWS CloudFormation
CloudFormation is an infrastructure service giving users an easy way to create and manage a collection of AWS resources by deploying and updating them in a predictable way. It enables management of the entire infrastructure and resource set in a single text file.
- AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda is a serverless computing service that executes code in response to events and automatically manages the computer resources required by that code in an efficient and flexible manner.
Top Azure Cloud Services
- Azure Blob Storage
Microsoft’s object storage cloud solution is used to store large amount of unstructured data. Azure Blob Storage is ideal for adding images and/or documents directly to the browser, creating log files, streaming audio or video media files, storing data for backup and disaster recovery and archiving.
- Azure Virtual Machine
Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) are compute and memory optimized VMs with per-second billing. It is the perfect tool for performing tasks, such as developing and testing applications, deploying applications to the cloud on demand, and creating offsite virtual data centers.
- Azure Backup
Azure Backup is a service provided by Microsoft Azure for backing up and restoring data through the Microsoft cloud. Azure Backup replaces your existing on-premise or offsite backup solution with a reliable, secure and cost-effective cloud-based solution.
- Azure Cosmos DB
Cosmos DB is a globally distributed NOSQL database service taking control of your data, even if it is stored in any data center around the world. It offers transparent multi-master replication with a single digit millisecond response time. Cosmos BD helps with fully managed database administration via automated management, updates and patches.
- Azure Logic App
Azure Logic App service aptly creates powerful integrated solutions that help connect data, apps and devices anywhere. It is part of the Azure App Service that provides an easy way to build and run business with trading partners via electronic data interchange and enterprise application integration standards.
- Azure Kubernetes Service
Azure Kubernetes Service provides provisioning, scaling, and upgrading resources on demand or as needed without downtime in your Kubernetes clusters. This allows developers and administrators to focus on application workloads rather than infrastructure components. Kubernetes provides a convenient and declarative way to deploy large numbers of containers with a powerful set of APIs to reduce the intricacy of task management.
- API Management
API Management is the process of publishing, managing, analyzing and securing APIs in no time. It helps accelerate the creation of successful API programs by delivering core competencies such as developer engagement, business insight, analytics, security, and protection. It allows users to write full-fledged API programs with any backend and is one of the most secure tools using IP filters, tokens and keys to protect all APIs.
- Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Azure CDN enables developers globally to integrate with services like webapps, cloud service storage and deliver high-bandwidth static content by caching it at locatoins nearest to users. This enables transferring load off the original server to POPs placed across multiple locations worldwide. Advanced analytics within CDN services provide valuable insights into customer workflows and business requirements.
- Azure Site Recovery
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is a data recovery or Disaster Recovery as a Service solution (DRaaS) on an enterprise level that ensures the finest security and recovery of solutions. It helps in the recovery of data in the cloud with minimal or zero interruptions enabling low downtime, multiple data backups, and cost effectiveness.
- Azure DevOps
Azure DevOps provides an end-to-end DevOps toolchain for building, testing, deploying and delivering applications and services at a fast pace. It takes care of source code repositories, requirements management, project management, automated builds, lab management, release management and is a good option for enterprises looking to plan and collaborate ably.
Top GCP Cloud Services
- Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine (GCE) platform is based on infrastructure as a service (IaaS). It’s an integral part of GCP that allows customers to run their workloads on linux or windows based virtual machines (VMs). It offers scalable and flexible VM computing capabilities in the cloud. It is usually used to tackle large-scale processing and analytical issues pertaining to Google’s computing, storage and network infra.
- Container Engine
Google Container Engine (GKE) is a cluster manager and orchestration system to deploy, scale, operate and manage Docker containers. The GKE can be deployed for use on on-premise, hybrid, or public cloud infrastructure. It is driven by the open-source Kubernetes system that contain enterprise-ready contianerized solutions with pre-built templates for deployment, featuring portability, comprehensive billing and easy licensing.
- Cloud Storage
Google Cloud Storage offers its users a RESTful data service that allows them to store and access data from any location on Google cloud infrastructure. Additionally, the service offers a vast array of features such as efficient performance, scalability, security, and sharing.
- Cloud SQL
Cloud SQL provides managed services for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server databases, as well as backups, high availability and maintenance. It allows users to create, manage, and use relational databases stored on Google Cloud servers. The service itself manages and secures databases, so users can focus more on application and operational enhancemnets.
5. Bigtable
Bigtable is Google Cloud’s fast and fully managed, highly scalable NoSQL database service that supports in collection and retention of large-scale analytical and operational data. It is designed for data that require high number of reads and writes per second, have consistent latency, with seamless scalability and 99.999% availability.
6. Bigquery
Bigquery is a fully managed data analytics service provided by Google. The main objective of the Google BigQuery service is to enable enterprises to analyze big data along with the ability to run ad-hoc queries on multi-terabyte datasets and share data insights across the web. It features highly scalable data storage capabilities that can accommodate upto hundreds of terabytes of data.
7. Machine Learning
Google Cloud Machine learning is a fully managed service that allows users to build machine learning models. This service primarily provides enterprise-grade support, performance and managed services for AIML based workloads with features like prioritized patches, bug fixes, automated provisioning and scaling of resources.
8. Cloud CDN
Cloud CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a service that leverages Google’s global edge network to deliver content to users at different global locations. With geographically distributed network of proxy servers and data centers, CDN aims at providing maximum perfornace, additonally delivering highly available resources to end users.
9. Google Cloud Virtual Network
GCP VPC (Google Cloud Virtual Private Network) service provides flexible and scalable networking capabilities for Compute Engine VM instances, Google Kubernetes Engine clusters, and App Engine environments for all their global users. Key features include VPC network, flow logs, peering, firewall, routing and shared services to name a few.
10. Operations suite (formerly Stackdriver)
Google Cloud’s operations suite (formely Stackdriver) is a cloud computing systems management service that provides performance and diagnostics data for applications and virtual machines (VMs) running on public cloud. It is a multi-cloud solution that facilitates businesses to monitor, troubleshoot, and operate cloud deployments and includes advanced observability features such as debuggers and profilers.
Conclusion
Choosing the right set of cloud services for your business needs are vital. Comprehensive cloud services are a treasure trove for businesses looking to achieve their futuristic goals. Therefore, it is not an exaggeration when it is said that every enterprise can choose a combination of cloud services that best fits the quality and delivery of their business while gaining maximum value from cloud.