Microsoft Azure vs Amazon, Google, and VMware
Posted by: Dmitry Sotnikov on: October 29, 2008
Now that we had a few days to look at Microsoft’s Windows Azure it is time to compare it with other alternatives on the market. For our comparison we picked solutions from the biggest players in the market and potential to impact the industry in that area: Microsoft Windows Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine, and VMware vCloud.
It is obviously too early to declare a clear winner here. Below is a feature-by-feature comparison table. Here’s a quick summary for each of them.
Microsoft Windows Azure
Currently in early private beta but boasts an impressive set of APIs, great development story, and a promise for good enterprise integration.
Amazon Web Services
The most mature solution on the market and the first one to exit beta. Offers basic cloud infrastructure required (compute power to run virtual machines, storage, communication queues, database) and allows you to fully control your virtual machines and run your LAMP- or Microsoft-stack applications any way you like.
Google App Engine
Boasts the “drop your code and we’ll figure out the rest” approach taking care of all the scalability and infrastructure management for you.
VMware vCloud
A pre-announced solution promising to let you simply take your standard VMware virtual appliances and run them anywhere: on-premise or in a datacenter of any provider supporting VMware’s infrastructure.
Now let’s look at each of them closer and examine them feature by feature:
|
Feature |
Microsoft |
Amazon |
|
VMware |
|
Availability |
Early private CTP |
Yes, commercially available |
In public beta |
Announced |
|
Computing Architecture |
You provide .NET code for front-end and back-end servers which |
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) allows you to upload your XEN virtual |
You write your web application in Python or Django with a specific |
Lets you easily move your virtual machines between environments and |
|
Load balancing |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Not announced |
|
Storage |
Yes: application storage and SQL services |
Yes: Simple Storage Service (S3) and SimpleDB |
Yes: database Datastore APIs |
Not announced |
|
Message queuing for machine communcations |
Yes: queues in Windows Azure storage |
Yes: Simple Queue Service (SQS) |
No |
Not announced |
|
Integration with other services |
So called .NET services (aka BizTalk in the cloud): Access control services, workflow service, service bus. Live Mesh Various Live services (contacts, mail, maps and so on.) At the moment, all these components do not seem to be integrated with |
No |
Yes, with existing Google services: authentication, mail, base, calendar, |
No |
|
Tied to the vendor datacenter |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
No, the VMs can be hosted by any of the partners or used on-premise |
|
Development tools |
Yes, integration into Visual Studio, support for any .NET languages, |
Not applicable. Amazon simply runs your virtual machines and does not |
Yes, have basic editing, local simulation, and deployment tools. Application-level tools such as Google Web Toolkit (GWT) do not seem |
Not applicable. VMware simply runs your virtual machines and does not |
What’s your take? Did I miss any features or comparison criteria?
Technorati Tags: Amazon, Amazon Web Services, AWS, Cloud Computing, EC2, Google, Google Apps Engine, Microsoft, PDC, vCloud, VMware, Windows Azure
25 Responses to "Microsoft Azure vs Amazon, Google, and VMware"
October 30, 2008 at 8:54 am
А не рано сравнивать?
VMware вообще голодранцем выглядит 
MS весь в белом, но что будет после релиза?
И можно ли сравнивать вообще?
у VMware это скорее продукт.
У MS(да и прочих) скорее услуга.
теплое с мягким.
October 30, 2008 at 11:26 am
Михаил,
Потенциально, VMware выглядит очень интересно в том, что они единственные, кто не собирается привязывать клиента к своему датацентру.
Это очень привлекательно. Потому что со всеми остальными есть большая проблема в том, что они заставляют вас размещать свое приложение у них и только у них. А если через год оказывается, что сервис, скажем, Гугла, Амазона или Микрософта так себе, сплошные простои и денег берут чрезмерно – то уже никуда не деться – надо под другого провайдера все переписать.
У вмвары (на бумаге) все с этим хорошо. Хочешь: гоняй машины у себя внутри сети, хочешь: у *любого* из провайдеров партнеров, хочешь: везде по чуть-чуть и постоянно переходи от одного к другому.
См.: http://cloudenterprise.info/2008/10/01/vcloud-ec2-killer/
При этом степень готовности продукта, конечно, разная от самого зрелого в этой четверки Амазона до даже недоступной в бете вмвары.
Что будет с вмварой и микрософтом к моменту их релиза сейчас трудно сказать. Да и Амазон с Гуглом не будут стоять на месте. В общем, будем следить и обновлять матрицу.
Митя
[...] Microsoft Azure vs Amazon, Google, and VMware Posted on October 30, 2008 by Markus Klems http://cloudenterprise.info/2008/10/29/microsoft-azure-vs-amazon-google-and-vmware/ [...]
October 31, 2008 at 9:45 am
One big player is missing.
http://www.slicehost.com/ just bought by RackSpace worlds biggest hosting provider.
There cloud computing business is cales MOSSO
http://www.mosso.com/
It has al kinds of services. I am a user of SliceHost for some time and it is very easy and nice to use.
So please also review them
[...] it for Tiling ? Posted October 31, 2008 Filed under: Uncategorized | Cloudenterprise has posted a helpful table comparing Azure with AWS, Google and [...]
November 1, 2008 at 12:59 pm
Anonymous who said, “Salesforce should be included in the comparison” obviously doesn’t get it. salesforce is a tiny sub-set of what the cloud is about. they’ll be gone soon….
[...] Microsoft Azure vs Amazon, Google, and VMware Now that we had a few days to look at Microsoft’s Windows Azure it is time to compare it with other alternatives [...] [...]
November 12, 2008 at 8:16 pm
You forgot to mention that the Azure Services are accessible from Ruby and Java (with open source SDKs and samples available now). And that Microsoft has announced that native code will be supported in the future (opening the door for writing ruby and java code that can run on Azure).
November 12, 2008 at 8:17 pm
Oops…you also forgot to mention Salesforce.com. They have a very powerful cloud platform!
November 13, 2008 at 2:30 pm
I was under impression that Salesforce.com basically lets you develop add-ons to their system, and thus are limiting the user base you can reach, whereas with other folks your apps are accessible to the whole world.
Is that (still) the case?
If it is, that would be a bit like comparing Excel macros with Windows APIs.
[...] With the Windows Azure SDKsteve clayton- geek in disguise – Cloud Computing As An Economic CatalystMicrosoft Azure vs Amazon, Google, and VMwareThe inside view of Microsoft's cloud strategyTechnology Review- Opening the Cloud (interesante [...]
[...] a level of abstraction around the platform: compute, storage and management. CloudEnterprise has an interesting comparison of Windows Azure to Amazon AWS, Google App Engine and [...]
[...] http://cloudenterprise.info/2008/10/29/microsoft-azure-vs-amazon-google-and-vmware/ Sphere: Related Content Analysis, Google Strategy, Technology [...]
[...] They are still pretty far from having that firmed up, but one thing that all of the cloud services highlights is as you start to take pieces of an application that are normally hosted in the same data center and then scatter them into the cloud, it will be very difficult to manage QoS between nodes. It will be interesting to see how they address this when/if componentized services hosted in the cloud gain decent adoption. I found an interesting article that discusses the different features in each cloud service offering. Read it at: http://cloudenterprise.info/2008/10/29/microsoft-azure-vs-amazon-google-and-vmware/ [...]
January 10, 2009 at 7:09 pm
Operating system support could have been included.
Like whether it supports instances like Linux, Windows and so on.
Regards
Balaji
February 9, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Yes, a good point.
With VMware vCloud – the answer is obviously we don’t know yet, but I would imagine that they are doing as much as they can to have Windows licensing agreement struck with Microsoft. Linux should obviously be OK anyways.
Microsoft is Windows only and not likely to change soon.
Amazon is Windows and Linux.
And for Google the question is really not applicable as they are offering APIs much higher up the stack and do not let you work on OS level at all.
June 8, 2009 at 8:57 pm
Thank you for the interesting article, and all the additional links to other interesting articles. Does anyone know if there are plans for cloud-based eCommerce software such as dashcommerce, or osCommerce? I look forward to seeing which one of the above mentioned players will establish itself as the go-to company for businesses.
August 18, 2009 at 1:39 am
Google App Engine can also run Java as well as Ruby on Rails via JRuby which is a Java TM implementation of the Ruby interpreter. With JRuby in a sense you get the best of both worlds, i.e. Ruby libraries plus Java libraries which can be accessed using either Ruby or Java language. Check out: http://jruby-rack.appspot.com/
[...] облачных вычислений можно также посмотреть здесь): When asked to compare VMware vCloud product roadmap with Microsoft’s Windows Azure [...]
August 19, 2010 at 10:37 am
Well articulated description of the “Cloud” and the different vendors. To add further, customers can choose various vendors based upon their application or Infrastructure requirements. WOLF is one of the emerging Cloud based business application development & delivery platform developed using open standards and Microsoft .NET stack on a pay-per-use model.
Look us up @ http://www.wolfframeworks.com/ for more details
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