Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and the Google Cloud Platform are three of the top names when it comes to cloud networking. If you want the best cloud solutions, these three are your most likely choices. Get to know which among the three is the best for your needs.
AWS arguably has the edge in terms of popularity and ecosystem. Many companies such as Aviatrix provide services that complement or relate to the cloud platform of Amazon. However, is it popular enough to hail AWS as the best? What do Azure and Google Cloud offer that AWS can’t? For this comparison, the focus is on the networking capabilities of the big three.
AWS
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The highlight of Amazon’s networking service is the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), which refers to a collection of networking services representing one network with a dedicated IP range having EC2 instances and a host of other network resources. AWS supports a maximum of 5 VPCs for every region, but this ceiling can be lifted upon request.
AWS promises low latency for connections of up to 10 GBps, which is made possible by having instances assigned to a common placement group. This setup provides the insurance that instances are running near to each other to achieve optimum performance. This scheme, however, has the drawback of sacrificing availability in case the underlying hardware encounters problems.
Azure
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Microsoft’s counterpart to the AWS VPC is called the Azure Virtual Networks (VNets). These come with the ability to generate virtual networks that host virtual machines, simulated appliances, as well as platform-as-a-service offerings such as app service environments and cloud services.
Azure supports network peering between VNets. The peering setup is made configurable between VNets assigned to the same region, resulting in low latency. The configurations can be made across subscriptions and may also be utilized to enable connections between resources under classic VNet and the newer Vnets based on the ARM architecture. For those who don’t want to use network peering, there’s the option to use a VPN gateway, which permits Vnet to Vnet links in one or multiple regions.
Google Cloud Platform
Google’s networking in the cloud is through the Cloud Virtual Network, which is capable of handling up to 7,000 virtual machine instances. What makes Google’s cloud platform different from those of AWS and Azure, though, is that the networks can cover resources deployed across several regions. This design significantly mitigates the need for advanced configurations for VPN and network peering.
Every virtual machine in the Cloud Virtual Network has a dynamic private IP address that is assigned based on the address range of its subnet, and a nonobligatory public IP address may be allocated. The Google Cloud Platform, however, supports fewer IP addresses compared to those of the AWS and Azure systems. This is a drawback for those who intend to run virtual appliances that need multiple network interfaces.
It’s difficult to point out the best cloud networking platform among the three. They have their respective strengths and weaknesses. The best choice depends on the needs. The notable differences, though, are in the managed WAF of AWS, Azure’s platform-as-a-service networking support, and Google’s App Engine, which lets app developers agilely build applications without having to go through the server.