Cloud Computing Offering Comparison

Hello and welcome to my first new blog post of the decade…aka 2010!

I recently underwent a research of the various big cloud providers as part of a new project / product inside PicNet and I thought this would be a good place to share with you some of my thoughts on the differences between the big 3 cloud providers: Amazon, Microsoft & Google and some other competitors such as GoGrid, The Rackspace Cloud and Melbourne IT.

I will also touch on VMware’s Cloud Platform (vCloud Express) which is available from a number of providers.

With so much noise being created around cloud computing it will gain even more traction and attention in 2010.

So without further ado here are my findings presented in a nice table format:

Prices correct as of Jan 2010 (click to expand)

Conclusions

• It seems that with most providers that storage and data charges are the same amongst providers
• Compute power pricing differs a fair amount because it is difficult to get equal compute power from multiple providers
• Amazon has the most established, stable platform offering the widest array of support for different technologies - hence is current king of cloud.
• The only offering in Australia at present is from Melbourne IT which is a limited beta of VMware’s vCloud Express platform. I expect more cloud providers to start popping up that run this as the underlying platform.
• Google is the only provider to allow you to get going for free for small apps, however its use in the enterprise is an unknown at this stage.
• Security and Privacy of Cloud Providers is also a bit sketchy at this stage with not a whole lot of documentation available on how your data is protected.