“AWS, Azure or Google: Do the differences between cloud providers really matter? - Cloud Tech” plus 1 more

AWS, Azure or Google: Do the differences between cloud providers really matter? - Cloud Tech

Posted: 23 Sep 2019 02:22 AM PDT

When evaluating public cloud providers, it is easy to get hung up on the differences. AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud each have their own terminology, pricing, service catalog, and purchasing variations. But do these differences ultimately matter?

Compute options

Though we are able to align comparable products across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, there are of course differences between these offerings. In fact, with the number of products and services available today (we've counted 176 from AWS alone), comparing each is beyond the scope of this article.

For our purposes, we can compare what is still the core product for cloud service providers: compute. Compute products make up about two thirds of most companies' cloud bills, so the similarities and differences here will account for the core of most users' cloud experiences.

Here's a brief comparison of the compute option features across cloud providers:

Of course, if you plan to make heavy use of a particular service, such as Function-as-a-Service/serverless, you'll want to do a detailed comparison of those offerings on their own.

Pricing

That covers functionality. How do the prices compare? One way to do this is by selecting a particular resource type, finding comparable versions across the cloud providers, and comparing prices. Here's an example of a few instances' costs as of this writing (all are Linux OS):

For more accurate results, pull up each cloud provider's price list. Of course, not all instance types will be as easy to compare across providers – especially once you get outside the core compute offerings into options that are more variable, more configurable, and perhaps even charged differently (in fact, AWS and Google actually charge per second).

Note that AWS and Azure list distinct prices for instance types with the Windows OS, while Google Cloud adds a per-core license charge, on top of the base instance cost.

The table above represents the default On Demand pricing options. However, each provider offers a variety of methods to reduce these base costs, which we'll look at in the Purchasing Options section.

Terminology

At first glance, it may seem like the cloud providers each have a unique spread of offerings. But many of these products and services are quite similar once you get the names aligned. Here are a few examples:

Obviously, this is not a sign of substantive differences in offerings – and just goes to show that the providers are often more similar than it might appear at first glance.

Purchasing options

Comparisons of the myriad purchasing options are worth several articles on their own, so I'll keep it high level here. These are the most commonly used – and discussed – options to lower costs from the listed On Demand prices for AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

Reservations

Each of the major cloud providers offers a way for customers to purchase compute capacity in advance in exchange for a discount: AWS Reserved Instances, Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances, and Google Committed Use discounts. There are a few interesting variations, for example, AWS offers an option to purchase "Convertible Reserved Instances", which allow reservations to be exchanged across families, operating systems, and instance sizes. On the other hand, Azure offers similar flexibility in their core Reserved VM option. Google Cloud's program is somewhat more flexible regarding resources, as customers must only select a number of vCPUs and memory, rather than a specific instance size and type.

What about if you change your mind? AWS users have the option to resell their reservations on a marketplace if they decide they're no longer needed, while Azure users will pay a penalty to cancel, and Google users cannot cancel.

Spot and preemptible instances

Another discounting mechanism is the idea of spot instances in AWS, low-priority VMs in Azure, and preemptible VMs, as they're called on Google. These options allow users to purchase unused capacity for a steep discount. The cost of this discount is that these instances can be interrupted (or perhaps Azure puts it best with their "evicted" term) in favor of higher priority demand – i.e. someone who paid more. For this reason, this pricing structure is best used for fault-tolerant applications and short-lived processes, such as financial modeling, rendering, and testing. While there are variations in the exact mechanisms for purchasing and using these instance types across clouds, they have similar discount amounts and use cases.

Sustained use discounts

Google Cloud Platform offers another cost-saving option that doesn't have a direct equivalent in AWS or Azure: Sustained Use Discounts. This is an automatic, built-in discount for compute capacity, giving you a larger percentage off the more you run the instance. Be aware that the GCP prices listed can be somewhat misleading, as a sustained use discount is already built in, assuming full-month usage – but it is nice to see the cloud provider looking after its customers and requiring no extra cost or work for this discount.

Contracts

A last sort of "purchasing option" is related to contract agreements. With all three major cloud providers, enterprise contracts are available. Typically, these are aimed at enterprise customers, and encourage large companies to commit to specific levels of usage and spend in exchange for an across-the-board discount – for example, AWS EDPs, Azure Enterprise Agreements. As these are not published options and will depend on the size of your infrastructure, your relationship with the cloud provider, etc., it's hard to say what impact this will have on your bill and how it will compare between clouds.

The 'it' factor

There's also just the pure perception of the differences between cloud providers.

For instance, some may perceive Azure as a bit stodgy, while Google Cloud seems slick but perhaps less performant than AWS. Some appreciate AWS and Azure's enterprise support more and find Google Cloud lacking here, but this is changing as Google onboards more large customers and focuses on enterprise compatibility.

There are also perceptions regarding ease of use, but actually, we find these to be most affected by the platform you're used to using. Ultimately, whatever you're most familiar with is going to be the easiest – and any can be learned.

Do the differences really matter?

On some of the factors we went through above, the cloud providers do have variations. But on many variables, the providers and their offerings are so similar as to be equivalent. If there's a particular area that's especially important to your business (such as serverless, or integration with Microsoft applications), you may find that it becomes the deciding factor.

The fact of the matter is, you're likely to be using multiple clouds soon, if you're not already – so you will have access to the advantages of each provider. Additionally, applications and data are now more portable than ever due to containers.

So, prepare yourself and your environment for a multi-cloud reality. Build your applications to avoid vendor lock-in. Use cloud-agnostic tools where possible to take advantage of the benefits of abstraction layers.

Even if you're only considering one cloud at the moment, these choices will benefit you in the long run. And remember: if your company is telling you to use a specific cloud provider, or an obscure requirement drives you to one in particular – don't worry. The differences don't matter that much.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

The Autonomous Database plan

Oracle's most interesting product is its Autonomous Database, which promises to automate a lot of hours spent on administration, patching, and security. To Ellison, Oracle's Autonomous Database is the headliner of the company, as well as the secret weapon to fend off threats from cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure (now an Oracle Cloud partner), Google Cloud Platform, and open-source alternatives.

What's unclear is whether the market is moving away from premium database offerings to good enough alternatives. In Oracle's financial analyst meeting transcript, the word "autonomous" was said 73 times.

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Juan Loaiza, executive vice president of Oracle's mission-critical database technologies, said Autonomous Database could even recast the company's image. He said:

When we talk about autonomous database, we say the word database, but it's really the whole stack. Traditionally, customers built their whole thing. They bought servers, storage, network, OS, back-up, all that stuff, they put it together themselves. When a customer gets an autonomous database from us, they get the whole stack. So that increases our addressable market quite substantially. It's one thing.

Second, again, autonomous database is self-driving. That's nice. Oracle has not been known to be the easiest-to-use database in the world. That hasn't been our reputation. It's been known as the most mission-critical database in the world. Now actually, we're the simplest-to-use database in the world. That opens up new markets. So people like developers were scared to use Oracle before. Smaller businesses were scared to use Oracle before. Lines of businesses within companies were scared to use Oracle before. Data scientists were trying to do all this machine learning data science, were scared to use Oracle. Why? Because it was kind of complicated to use Oracle. Now with autonomous database, we're the -- we're literally the simplest database in the world.

Ellison said the Autonomous Database is one element of keeping customers on the database reservation. He also questioned whether customers were leaving Oracle databases. He said:

People will just move off the Oracle Database. Really? No one's moved off the Oracle Database. Name somebody. Go on to Amazon's website, and I'll show you names of companies who moved up the Oracle Database, you've never heard of those companies. Bob and Sarah's Pie Shop and Towing Company. Biloxi, Mississippi. Bob deceased. Sarah is still available.

He added that the Autonomous Database is pulling customers over. "We're seeing the Autonomous Database now of adoption rate beginning to spike. 500 new customers this past quarter, we'll have over 1,000 new customers in this quarter. It's now happening. Now it's happening. They'll take an existing data warehouse or a new data warehouse project, they'll move that over, they will -- they typically start slowly," said Ellison.

Analysts were skeptical about Oracle's database prospects and Autonomous Database uptake.

Stifel analyst Brad Reback said:

There is little question that Oracle's installed base is extremely secure, given the time, money, and operational risk of moving a legacy workload off of it. At the end of the day, there is no real ROI to that transition. However, as legacy workloads get replaced, we believe there are increasingly good alternatives to Oracle (hyperscale solutions, NoSQL, open source, etc.) and that the developer community (not many new SaaS apps are built on top of Oracle) and enterprise customers are increasingly moving in this direction.

Evercore ISI analyst Kirk Materne said the database upgrade cycle will take time. Materne said:

Oracle highlighted the ongoing innovation in the database such as AI/ML and a converged database. After speaking with some customers and partners, the question is how quickly can customers adopt this technology and at what cost? While it's hard to argue against the potential value associated with an autonomous database, we believe the shift towards autonomous and OCI within the Oracle customer base will take time.

Move to the cloud

The Industry Cloud: Why It's Next

The industry cloud has taken off and big businesses have been built by the likes of Veeva, Rootstock and others. Here's why the focus has allowed the industry to thrive even as giants like Salesforce, Oracle and SAP eye their turf.

Ellison said that if Oracle can move its database customers to the cloud along with its application installed base, there's an argument that the company will be the biggest cloud player. Ellison maintained that the stock market wasn't valuing Oracle's cloud potential.

Ellison said:

We think we're going to get virtually all of the Oracle databases, which is most of the world's data. It sounds crazy, right? Because if Oracle really holds on to its database franchise and moves it to the cloud, I'll ask you, it is the most interesting question of the day, so how big is Oracle? If we hold on to our database franchise, think about all the applications that are built on top of Oracle databases. Remember, we were way bigger than IBM and Microsoft combined in the database business. Still are, still are. If that all moves to them cloud and we get it, how big are we?

Oracle internal applications will be on the Oracle Cloud, the company argued its second-generation infrastructure is winning converts and the data center footprint is swelling. "We get a tremendous leverage in technology, things you see like machine learning and digital assistants or bots; and things you don't see, infrastructure updates, reliability, security going forward. The notion of technical debt in the Oracle Cloud has basically disappeared because we sit on top of that investment that we have going forward," said Ellison.

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While Oracle talked about its infrastructure as a service, databases moving to the cloud and broader services, the main driver will be software as a service. Apps will drive Oracle forward, said analysts.

Oracle CEO Safra Catz said the company's move to its own cloud proves the point that its offerings are industrial strength. Ellison added that its infrastructure cloud will ultimately give its applications an edge over Salesforce, Workday, SAP, and other competitors.

And, yes, Ellison is still a wee bit obsessed with AWS, which has said it moved from Oracle to AWS.

Ellison said:

Listen, AWS is the first mover. They have the idea, the rent -- to go ahead and rent computers. It was brilliant, and it's been enormously successful, and it's really -- they fundamentally have changed computing, but they really -- I mean they don't develop databases. They don't develop programming languages. We develop Java. We develop the Oracle Database. We develop Fusion applications. They don't do anything like that.

Analysts aren't yet sharing Oracle's enthusiasm for its cloud broadly speaking. However, Oppenheimer analyst Brian Schwartz said the growth of the SaaS business is critical to everything else.

We left impressed with the look, capabilities and integration of Oracle's SaaS applications and next-gen cloud infrastructure. To improve sentiment, we believe Oracle needs its SaaS business to grow faster. This development would convince investors that its database customers will migrate workloads and grow with Oracle since its enterprise SaaS business can pull through infrastructure demand.

Oracle@Oracle

Kehring, a 20-year veteran at Oracle, outlined how the company has retooled its business processes to take advantage of cloud computing. His talk at Oracle's analyst meeting highlighted the following points:

Oracle is moving from a product and licensing company to one that revolves around services and subscriptions.

The company has largely moved its internal applications all to Oracle's Cloud. We're sort of at that point of no return where we are nearly 100% having moved all of our applications to the cloud across ERP, supply chain, HCM, CX, and EPM. It's all up and running inside Oracle. It is the platform that's powering these new business processes," said Kehring.

Oracle is aiming to tell its own story internally as well as to customers. The catch is that Oracle will need some time to change its image with customers.

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Kehring explained:

Special Feature

Managing the Multicloud

A multicloud approach has been talked about for years within enterprises, but few companies have gone that direction. Now it's easier to go multicloud and AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform all share customers. Here's a look at managing multiple cloud providers, how to play them off each other and what vendors and tools can help you manage multiple clouds.

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We realized we're in a great position to share our story. We've always believed that we should, at Oracle, use our own technologies. And obviously, we've done that throughout our history. But more than that, we want to be our #1 reference. We want to be the best customer inside Oracle. We adopt first so that we can learn. We can learn and we can help the development team continuously improve. But the reality is our customers are demanding to understand, hey, how do you do it well? How do you do it effectively? How -- give me some insight into how this works, and that led to the Oracle@Oracle Experience.

Much of the Oracle@Oracle effort revolves around content that can evangelize Oracle Cloud to the sales field as well as customers to outline the returns such as efficiency, faster decision-making and the ability to be agile vs. the competition. Oracle's Kehring said the plan is to take Oracle@Oracle on the road beyond OpenWorld to open a dialogue with customers.

In a nutshell, Oracle@Oracle is part of a new branding effort for the company. At OpenWorld, Oracle tried out some branding with just an "O" and there was less red everywhere. Yes, Oracle was front and center, but less in your face about it.

Catz outlined why a new brand spin was necessary.

We feel that natural colors and -- seriously, natural colors sort of are much more approachable. Because the reality is, we have to move from just a product company to a service company. And when you're a service company, you have to have a much more approachable feel to you. And so we've really internalized that in every way.

Cloud artiicle 14

Monday, September 23, 2019