Cloud Computing : What Windows Azure does better than Google Cloud

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After having done with the top 10 cloud computing service provider, we focused on the increasing competition in Cloud Computing market. Cloud computing is fast emerging as a popular concept for enterprises that realize the benefits of shared infrastructure, lower costs and lower management overhead. Cloud Computing can be anticipated to be a single point of access for all computing needs of consumers. We decided to draw a comparison between the two Platforms as a Service(PaaS) - Google App Engine (GAE) and Windows Azure. The cloud computing systems have been designed to   provide all of the facilities required to support the complete life cycle of building and delivering web applications and services entirely available from the Internet. Both the services offer a multi-lingual development environment. However, most entrepreneurs before making any major investment into one of these cloud computing services would be interested to know the potentially feasible option. We provide a comparative study focusing on Windows Azure’s benefits over GAE.

Multi-language support

GAE as well as Azure offer multi-lingual development environment. Azure .NET’s Visual Basic and C#, IronPython and IronRuby plus Java on the desktop and in the cloud. Azure allows you to leverage the power of C# and VB. It can also integrate the .Net savvy languages can F# and Iron Ruby being a consideration in the not to distant future. Google Action Engine gives Python as an option in addition to Java and there’s no roadmap for further language support. .Net services are being designed from the ground up as language agnostic with Java & Ruby SDKs being readily available

Types of Application

Azure offers two different types of application model - web roles and worker roles. Both of these can be used in Azure applications. Web roles are a common feature for Azure as well as GAE, typically request/response HTTP paradigm. What creates the difference between the two Cloud computing services is the Worker role, which adds processing and logic that is not triggered by web request. Consider the Windows service and you might get the right thing. It provides you the ability to run the background tasks and opens up loads of application possibilities that GAE is unable to offer. Further, GAE shows no roadmap of arriving sooner or later. GAE still lacks efficient long running processes.

Scalability

There have been instances on the web that indicate GAE would not hold up against traffic of a serious or sustained nature. GAE shows concerns over CPU and storage limitation, caching, database immutability and one in way in and out (via Google API). App Engine’s has a file limit of 1MB, which would seriously hinder the kind of audio-heavy enterprise applications.

Performance

AppEngine offers distributed caching using Memcache. The roadmap shows Azure plans to include Velocity. For a single web instance you have ASP.NET caching. With multiple web instances, you will be able to invalidate the other server’s cache.

Storage

Unlike GAE, Azure comes with a different storage options that supports the ADO.NET Data Services Framework to get the job done. Add more SQL Data Services Framework to get the job done. Add more familiar SQL Data Services platform. Azure’s storage options allow more flexibility than GAE. Evidently, GAE follows the one big table approach which has its own merits, but Azure boasts of a range of storage options.

Conclusion

It is clear that Microsoft’s Azure has a significant lead when it comes to application/language support. Microsoft offers wider scope with greater scalability and storage. What remains a concern is the security. Are the Windows Servers right choice for hosting your business.   Given that GAE is almost free, Microsoft needs to decide competative price for Azure to take over the cloud computing market.