Choosing the Right Compute Resources in the Cloud: An analysis of the compute services offered by Amazon, Microsoft and Google

In this paper we present a comparison of the various compute resources offered Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. We further identify several platform features including geographic availability, security and compliance, operating system support, container support, and serverless computing support that are directly comparable and provide recommendations and guidance for choosing a platform. We found that overall, for compute resources, Microsoft Azure is the preferred provider for many of the features we identify. However, that differential is quite small; in reality it is difficult to find significant differences between the platforms since they are ever-changing.