AWS vs Azure vs Google. Does it Even Matter? Which to Use and Why

[Music] actually one of the things that I'm really happy to hear that the cloud track today is how to use cloud services in gaming not why to use cloud services in gaming that's a that's a really important thing to hear I'm Mike Hynes and I've worked at Microsoft I've worked at Amazon I've done four of my own startups two of which were successful one of which lost everything and one of which I actually run today as a hobby but what I want to talk to you about right now is what I wish I had known about cloud services before I started my education startup and it'll be it'll be a good overview of kind of where they stand in relation to one another so the first thing I want to talk to you about is how I chose these three that I want to compare today first of all if you're a startup we know you've got limited runway you don't have an endless amount of money so why don't I look at some of the really less expensive cloud services that are out there well when I was doing the education startup I did exactly that I went with a local Seattle company that was offering some cloud services for a fraction of the price of AWS which was really the dominant player at the time and well that ended up being my second worst professional decision possibly my third worst depending on how today's presentation goes but ok just kidding so that would that wasn't a good idea so I've decided to use these criteria represented by the bullet points here go ahead and take a photo and that got me down to about five fighters to get down to three I took a look at how these cloud providers responded to the cloud hopper virus and that quickly got me to the three that we're talking about today Google Amazon and Microsoft so how are we going to compare those three today I want to look at capacity and reach or infrastructure the services and ability to manage those services and finally price what I'm gonna do is I'm going to list that bullet point on this handy little graph that I've made and we'll go ahead and and kind of see where they stand in relation to one another so first let's go with infrastructure to start off with I'd like to kind of briefly cover regions which are areas in which a cloud service provider keeps all of their Hardware regions are intentionally isolated from one another if you want to use your region to talk to another region you go out to the internet and you do it through the services interface availability zones are separate data centers that make up a region and these availability zones are connected with the private high speed high bandwidth almost backbone speed connections so it's really fast if you've got a massive multiplayer game online and you're ingesting a ton of data you can actually backup that data from one availability zone to another availability zone for really good location redundancy and relocation backup at very fast speeds now not everyone is designed their network the same way and I'd like to use this slide as an example of that you see on the first and third line that AWS and Google cloud platform both have about the same number of regions and about the same number of availability zones getting you sort of similar coverage worldwide but look at a sure my gosh what's up with Azure that's really different isn't it they started their cloud infrastructure modeled with a different assumption they kind of treated regions as equivalent to availability zones and when they needed to scale out they just built another region nearby it's not necessarily worse or not necessarily better what it is different so when you're looking at data like this on websites trying to decide which has the better infrastructure understand that they're taking different approaches and don't take a look at the numbers thinking that you can actually compare them when some include lots of availability zones one and three are not so many availability zones in where I'm going to give the edge to Amazon here they've simply got a lot more time and a lot more reach they've got better edge servers a good edge caches the backbone speed between availability zones is really impressive and you can actually go straight from a 5g network directly into a service which is a really neat thing to be able to do as opposed to having to go ahead and do that translation if you're working on mobile games Pocket Gamer come on who isn't having that 5g network access to your services is actually pretty important next I want to talk about service models so on this infrastructure what are you delivering AWS started this whole thing and has done a really good job of getting platform level stuff and infrastructure level stuff out to customers infrastructure level stuff is virtual servers it is you know basically spindles the hardware that you need to to run a data center the platform layer are the things that you run on top of that like data bases and stuff and really that's where Amazon has spent a lot of its time really honing his craft well Google is taken after that and they've done something very similar but Google also has a Chrome browser that pops up the stack a bit they've got also a chromium client that pops up the stack a bit and Google Docs of course well which helps get them a little bit farther up the stack but not nearly as far up the stack as Microsoft goes holy cow these guys just our full range they have Outlook servers outlook clients they've got office 365 I think they're even running Visual Studio as a service now in addition to the infrastructure and platform services that the rest of the cloud provides so on this one definitely Microsoft gets the nod on service models now you've got the stuff that you deliver there are three choices in how you're going to deliver that as deployment model probably the most common one is the public model this is what you think of when you think of cloud services Amazon is really good at this one they've been doing it for a long time second is a private a private network which is where you have dedicated hardware that only runs your stuff if you're in a regulation heavy environment this may be a requirement on Amazon it's kind of virtual separate hardware as opposed to actual separate hardware but Amazon will actually go to your data center and install AWS cloud services on your machines in your data center if you like for this one it's still pretty close a slight edge out to Microsoft and Google on that one now this is where the real money is the services that actually get the work done who's got what well Amazon's been in the business the longest and honestly if Amazon needs something done internally chances are they're using some of the AWS services that are available to you so their own needs generate a lot of the services that they have and their customer base obviously the larger at largest customer base in the business now it's generating a lot of that to Ashur has about half as many services as AWS does but they've got the fastest growing customer base because they're taking a slightly different approach to the services that I'll talk about in a sec Google Play sorry a Google cloud platform took a little bit of time to figure out what they wanted to do when they grow up but they've got a fairly good handle on it now and while they only have a little over 60 services available they're really good they're really high quality services definitely the edge here goes to Amazon for the depth breadth and customization of the services that they have to offer those services can be broken down into several core component groups like compute compute you get the virtual machines serverless machines basically these things are handled in large part at the base by the virtual machine component and the serverless component level all the cloud providers have roughly all the same stuff each provider has an advantage that they like to promote but there's not a huge difference and if there is a big difference it doesn't last for long with a speed of improvements in the industry advantage here to Amazon simply because they just have more options to choose from and you have more configurable options second is storage not database but spindles and everybody's got really slow really cheap storage and really expensive really fast storage so there's really no huge advantage here maybe advantage AWS because they've got more choices and they're more configurable still next I want to talk about databases this is where really interesting stuff happens certainly Azure and AWS have a lot of their own database solutions AWS in particular has a larger selection of configurable database solutions for your pivot for business needs but data lakes are kind of like the big thing now and being able to run analytics on relational data almost as quickly as it comes in is a big deal and Google has a ton of that data so they develop some technology it's public now it's it's Hadoop that was how you deal with this large set of relational relational data spread over a whole bunch of different commodity priced servers it's really good it's also public AWS and azure have come up with some really great services that use a dupe and that's been really that's been wonderful the thing is Google hasn't been standing still all that time and the next big thing that they've been using in their own data centers they're now offering to customers as as bigquery here and when you pair bigquery with firebase which is something that Google Offers is game services that's actually a pretty powerful solution so I'm gonna give the advantage here to Google because s is simply a really clean really nice solution next is the network network I'm talking IP availability IP configuration load balancers load balancer configuration failover speeds back that kind of work here the advantage goes to Amazon it's just there are more options are more configurable and there are some important things you just actually can't do with your IP addresses on Azure or or on GCP next is analytics this is kind of the second part to that whole data structure thing Amazon has had a lot of experiences with a lot of analytics and that's gonna give you a whole bunch of choices but a bigquery and firebase together for game developers man that's just super easy and it's pretty powerful so that bears watching Microsoft has some really good machine learning and AI technology that they're coming out in a natural stream that also bears watching but I'm gonna give the advantage here over to Google on analytics moving on to tools what do I mean by tools tools the ability to manage all of these services customize them to do what you want without question the most powerful and complete belong to AWS all of that complexity can make it a little bit challenging to learn and challenging to use to get simplicity of operation get up to speed get running quickly the edge goes to Azure Asher's toolset is not as complete as I think it needs to be but boy is it simple to learn and fast to get set up but for these other considerations definitely tools is a solid win for AWS next important to you know really important to you guys game developers are the game services at the offer services I'm going to include everything that for example AWS has Amazon has things like lumberyard which is a free triple a quality game engine that you can actually get the source code for for free it works really well with AWS cloud services they've also got um game Sparks and game lifts which they've they've acquired they could be a little bit they could be integrated a little bit better Google Play has gu sorry Google cloud services Google cloud platform has firebase and Azure a a firebase and sorry firebase in bigquery let me start over on that one Google cloud platform has firebase and bigquery which are awfully powerful when put together and bear considering but my favorite here has got to be a sure and their combination with play fab that is tight it's really clean it's really easy to implement and it's pretty powerful stuff they've got the same things that everybody else has leaderboards achievements player matching but they also do fraud detection that really well and they also do revenue optimization really well and that puts them as my favorite game services provider alright let's talk about price because at the end of the day you're gonna have to pay something cost management is it easy to understand what you're gonna pay next month and it is easy to understand what you've paid this month well honestly it's not actually easy to understand what what AWS is charged there are actually third-party companies that have the only business of figuring out what you've been charged and how you can actually manage your cost structure for future quarters that again that complexity the Amazon enables kind of catches up to it when you try to figure out the billing and exactly what you've been charged for easy to understand much easier or Azure and Google cloud platform so the wind goes to them on cost management actual out-of-pocket price if you're a triple-a studio you're gonna have an Account Manager call you and set up a sweet deal so don't worry about that but if you're an independent AWS tends to be on the more expensive side Google cloud platform tends to be on the less subside so the win here is going to go to Google cloud platform now Amazon and Microsoft aren't sleeping at the wheel here they understand how this works so they've offered some price assistance as a matter of fact all three services offer some price assistance Google cloud platform for startups will help you lower the cost of cloud credits Amazon activate can lower the cost of AWS credits Bismarck by Microsoft will help you lower the cost of azure credits and lower or eliminate the cost of your Microsoft server licensing this is huge if you happen to be a Microsoft shop being able to get all out of your Microsoft licenses for free is big that gives the advantage to Microsoft when it comes to cost help when you take a look at this in hole where do you land is there a winner or not well I mean I don't want to say hey based on how quickly developments are happening and how competitive all three services are we're the winners that's that's two paths right but what I want you to do is take a look at this and figure out which areas are important to you for example if you already run a data center with your own hardware and a Microsoft stack Asscher is gonna look a whole lot more attractive so I want you to take a sure and some of the next services and just eliminate one of one of the others and do a deeper dive on the two that you select if having the ultimate capability is really important to you you're gonna want to pick AWS as your first one and find something else that's really important too so for example if analytics database and and a lot of options are important to you you might want to you look at AWS and Google cloud platform so pick the three things the three services that are most important to you find out where they land pick two of these three and then do a deep dive at least action save you a little bit of time in figuring out which of the cloud service platforms is going to be best for you guys hopefully I was able to get you a little bit of time back because I know we're behind I will be available all the rest of well Kade there's not much of today left but all day tomorrow if you guys want to catch up to me and ask me questions thank you very much for coming and staying twenty minutes late for the talk I appreciate it [Applause] [Music]

Channel: PocketGamerbiz

Views: 8,421

Keywords: Mike Hines, Independent, Pocket Gamer Connects London, Pocket Gamer Connects, Mobile Games, Games Business, Cloud Gaming, 5G, Subscription

Id: 63M_ZHkr3I0

Length: 18min 31sec (1111 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 29 2020