Microsoft Azure vs Amazon, Google, and VMware

Posted by: Dmitry Sotnikov on: October 29, 2008

In: Amazon | Google | Microsoft | VMware
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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	Google	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 Microsoft then runs on Windows 2008 virtual machines according to your environment specifications (how many machines of each kind you need, and so on.)	Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) allows you to upload your XEN virtual machine images to the infrastructure and gives you APIs to instantiate and manage them.	You write your web application in Python or Django with a specific set of limitations set by Google and submit the application code to them.	Lets you easily move your virtual machines between environments and run them on premise or at any partner datacenter.
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 the solution but rather bundled.	No	Yes, with existing Google services: authentication, mail, base, calendar, contacts, documents, pictures, spreadsheets, YouTube.	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 care which development platform you are using on top of the base OS.	Yes, have basic editing, local simulation, and deployment tools. Language selection limited to Python and Django. Application-level tools such as Google Web Toolkit (GWT) do not seem to have any integration with Google App Engine.	Not applicable. VMware simply runs your virtual machines and does not care which development platform you are using on top of the base OS.