The choice between three big cloud providers - AWS, Microsoft Azure and the Google cloud platform - is troublesome, but they all provide a free trial platform.
More and more companies are increasingly turning to multiple cloud providers to avoid locking up with one of the three big vendors, or using the unique features within each platform, especially when it comes to artificial intelligence and machine learning.
This is why the free level is very important to the organization.
The early success of the AWS model has proved that the value of outsourcing technology infrastructure is also known as infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Now, the two leading competitors are increasingly hoping to attract developers to their cloud platforms through credit and free access to their growing number of cloud tools and services.
So, who has provided the most generous free package?
Google Cloud Platform
The Google cloud platform announced in March 2017 that it provided "forever free" services for all the well - used organizations, applicable to prototype or private beta, and the old policy of providing credit for old users: $300 in the first 12 months.
Always free of charge up to 1GB Google Cloud Datastore capacity, Google App Engine provides 28 instance hours a day, Google Compute Engine provides a mini statement per month, 5GB month's Google cloud storage (limited to the region), each cloud function for up to 2 million months, monitored logs and monitors, and Limited access to the following products: Google Cloud Natural Language, Cloud Vision API, Kubernetes Engine and so on.
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure now provides a similar model, but new registration functions are less.
It includes 750 hours Windows or Linux virtual machine for computing, 250GB SQL database storage, 5GB Blob simple storage, and 15GB outbound network bandwidth.
Microsoft now also provides free services, offering more than 25 Azure services free of charge throughout the year. However, this does not include core services such as computing and storage, but allows limited access to Bing Speech, Face API, machine learning studio, IoT Hub and more.
AWS
AWS is still available for students and startups, and is limited to GCP (limited to 12 months), and the "forever free" level is more limited, excluding core products such as S3 storage and EC2 (elastic Computing).
The 12 month option provides 1 million API calls a month, 750 times a month, EC2, 5GB S3 storage, 30GB Elastic Block storage, 500MB elastic container registration, and access to machine learning products, such as Lex, Polly, Rekognition, translation and transcription.
The free service provided by AWS is more to make developers familiar with development tools such as CodeCommit and X-Ray or CloudWatch monitoring, as well as 1 million of Lambda functionality and Glacier object storage for one month.
Ultimately, comparing cloud platforms depends on what you want to do.
Google will certainly provide some more generous restrictions so that developers can complete some serious prototype designs, and the free level is the most comprehensive feature of the three major features so far. On the other hand, Azure looks very stingy.
However, Azure and AWS have their own unique products, and users may want to get their patents, such as Lex for building voice interfaces, or Microsoft Face API for facial recognition, which does not mean that Google does not have its own machine learning expertise.