Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services or “AWS” for short, was the Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform that launched the cloud computing revolution, and continues to lead in the breadth of services available for developers and IT professionals. AWS has been recognized as a “Leader” in the top-right corner of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for ability to execute and completeness of vision for 8 consecutive years, as of 2018.
AWS became its own business within Amazon when the e-commerce company recognized that the systems architecture that supports its own world-scale operations could be sold to other businesses. The idea of on-demand, pay-as-you-go infrastructure with the ability to scale up-or-out infinitely was popularized by Amazon starting in 2006, when AWS became generally available. The rest of the cloud industry tends to follow and iterate upon AWS’ APIs, SDKs, and service models.
Beyond infrastructure, Amazon is also an innovator in services higher up in the stack such as managed databases, big data analytics, message queuing, machine vision, media transcoding, and desktop-as-a-service.
Google Cloud Platform
Google Cloud Platform is one of the three hyperscale cloud providers to be named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service. Not to be confused with Google’s services such as Gmail, Docs, or Drive, or the G Suite of apps for businesses, Google Cloud consists of IaaS and PaaS services for developing and deploying custom, self-hosted applications.
Although Google Cloud incorporates the technology & expertise that Google uses itself to provide services to billions of end users around the world, it is an enterprise-focused platform with its own Terms of Service that precludes Google from data mining workloads running on Google Cloud to “improve” its own products and services (e.g. ad targeting). GCP operates with some degree of separation from Google, the search & advertising company, meaning you can leverage Google’s worldwide end-to-end network without sacrificing privacy and security.
As the lead contributor to Kubernetes, Google Cloud is a particularly compelling option for deploying container & serverless apps using services such as GKS (Google Kubernetes Service) and Cloud Functions. GCP also has the foundational services one would expect from an IaaS platform, including VM instances, persistent disks, object storage, VPC networks, and load balancers. In July 2020, Google debuted Confidential VMs based on the Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) feature of 2nd generation AMD EPYC CPUs, with J.P. Morgan Chase as a highlighted customer.
For new customers, Google Cloud provides a $300 trial credit for 12 months (for new customers) and an Always Free VM f1-micro instance with 1 vCPU, 0.6GB RAM, and 30GB HDD in a US region.
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform run by Microsoft, which offers access, management, and development of applications and services through global data centers. It provides a range of capabilities, including software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Microsoft Azure supports many programming languages, tools, and frameworks, including Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems.
Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure, was introduced at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in October 2008 under the codename “Project Red Dog”. It was officially launched as Windows Azure in February 2010 and later renamed Microsoft Azure on March 25, 2014.
Microsoft Azure uses large-scale virtualization at Microsoft data centers worldwide and it offers more than 600 services.
CloudBARO VE
CloudBARO hyper-converged infrastructure running by Proxmox, an open-source software, which offers access and development of services and applications through our data center. We provide a range of capabilities, including SaaS and PaaS.