Google Compute Engine vs Microsoft Azure: What are the differences?
Google Compute Engine: Run large-scale workloads on virtual machines hosted on Google's infrastructure. Google Compute Engine is a service that provides virtual machines that run on Google infrastructure. Google Compute Engine offers scale, performance, and value that allows you to easily launch large compute clusters on Google's infrastructure. There are no upfront investments and you can run up to thousands of virtual CPUs on a system that has been designed from the ground up to be fast, and to offer strong consistency of performance; Microsoft Azure: Integrated cloud services and infrastructure to support computing, database, analytics, mobile, and web scenarios. Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. You can build applications using any language, tool or framework. And you can integrate your public cloud applications with your existing IT environment.
Google Compute Engine and Microsoft Azure can be categorized as "Cloud Hosting" tools.
Some of the features offered by Google Compute Engine are:
- High-performance virtual machines- Compute Engine’s Linux VMs are consistently performant, scalable, highly secure and reliable. Supported distros include Debian and CentOS. You can choose from micro-VMs to large instances.
- Powered by Google’s global network- Create large compute clusters that benefit from strong and consistent cross-machine bandwidth. Connect to machines in other data centers and to other Google services using Google’s private global fiber network.
- (Really) Pay for what you use- Google bills in minute-level increments (with a 10-minute minimum charge), so you don’t pay for unused computing time.
On the other hand, Microsoft Azure provides the following key features:
- Use your OS, language, database, tool
- Global datacenter footprint
- Enterprise Grade with up to a 99.95% monthly SLA
"Backed by google", "Easy to scale" and "High-performance virtual machines" are the key factors why developers consider Google Compute Engine; whereas "Scales well and quite easy", "Can use .Net or open source tools" and "Startup friendly" are the primary reasons why Microsoft Azure is favored.
9GAG, Snapchat, and CircleCI are some of the popular companies that use Google Compute Engine, whereas Microsoft Azure is used by Microsoft, Starbucks, and Accenture. Google Compute Engine has a broader approval, being mentioned in 592 company stacks & 427 developers stacks; compared to Microsoft Azure, which is listed in 497 company stacks and 470 developer stacks.