A User Perspective Overview of The Top Infrastructure as a Service and High Performance Computing Cloud Service Providers

This paper introduces an extensive overview of the Infrastructure as a Service offerings that are presented today by the top ranked cloud providers. It surveys their solutions related to Infrastructure as a Service and High Performance Computing, presenting their benefits and drawbacks from a cloud user perspective. Four leading cloud providers were chosen for this paper, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Microsoft Azure Cloud, Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud. The selected service providers are compared to each other in this paper from many perspectives. The comparison was done from the IaaS perspective. Reviews about these providers are presented in addition to pricing and billing details. Each one of these providers has its competitive advantages that already persuade its existing customer to invest more in their cloud and to attract new ones to migrate their resources to. In addition to the IaaS perspective, we present a comparison between the selected cloud providers from the High Performance Computing user perspective. These solutions are discussed; features of these solutions such as virtual machines options, their operating systems, and networking are compared.