AWS vs Azure vs Google Free Tier Comparison

AWS vs Azure vs Google Free Tier Comparison

Choosing between the three biggest cloud providers — Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) — can be a testing proposition, but one of the best things about them is that they all offer a free tier for spinning up an instance and trying out the platform before you buy.

Companies are increasingly turning to multiple cloud vendors to avoid lock-in with one of the big three, or to take advantage of unique capabilities within each platform, especially when it comes to AI and machine learning.

That’s why free tiers are vital to organizations looking to test out capabilities before diving in and providing their credit card details, with all three offering various ways to consume their cloud services for free, whether through credits or by applying tight usage limits.

All of the free tiers on offer from these three companies has a time restriction. From the time a business first signs up, they will have 12 months until the free tier expires.

Some key considerations:

• After signing up with both Google Cloud and Azure, they will offer service credit.
• Azure provides $200 worth of credit on sign-up, which can be used within the first 30 days. Spending this does not finish the free trial.
• With Google Cloud, you will be given $300 of credit, this can be used for any service within the Google Cloud Platform. Comparatively to Azure though, if these credits are spent before the end of the 12 month free trial, it will be ended early.

Microsoft Azure

• An account can make up to 1 million requests every month.
• They also offer 50,000 authentications each month.
• Up to 5 users can be created. Each of these has unlimited private Git repositories.
• For zero cost, a maximum of 10 apps can be built, across either web, mobile or API.
• 500GB of storage and 400 request units per second are available for free each month.
• 5 GB of outbound data

Google Cloud

• Up to 1TB of queries and 10GB of storage every month
• Every day a business has 120 free build minutes.
• You can have 5 users with 50GB of storage and 50GB of outbound data.
• 2m background and http invocations, with 5GB of outbound network data
• Storage available to users is 5GB of regional within the US.
• 5,000 Class A, 50,000 Class B operations and 1GB of outbould data, limited per compute engine.

Amazon Web Services

• 4000 free state transitions every month
• 10GB of long term data storage
• 5 users with 50GB of storage and 10,000 Git requests every month
• One active pipeline every month
• 100 build minutes on the build.general1.small instance
• 25GBof storage and 25 read and write units each month.

Conclusion

As with any comparison like this it very much depends on what you are looking to do and a fair amount of personal preference.

Google certainly offers some of the more generous limits to allow developers to get some serious prototyping done, and it’s always free tier is by far the most full featured of the three. On the flip side, Azure looks the stingiest.

However Azure and AWS have their own unique products that users may want to get their hands on, like Lex for building voice interfaces, or Microsoft’s Face API for facial recognition, that’s not to say that Google hasn’t got machine learning expertise of its own.