Conclusion
Clearly, cloud providers are aligning themselves in offering common database and storage services;
- Relational Databases
- All providers offers a custom (or native cloud) solution that have the advantage of better scalability, HA options and price but generate a lock-in
- They also offer a managed service of market databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server and MariaDB to simplify the migration of legacy applications and avoid lock-in
- The size limit is 64TB (100 TB for Azure)
- Non Relational Databases (Key Value, Columnar, Document and Graph)
- In this case the bet of all providers is to develop only custom solutions per each kind of Non Relational Databases
- There is some consensus to offer a Document Database with MongoDB compatibility (with the exception of Google).
- The Graph Database is emerging in 2019, and Google and Alibaba that don’t have a custom development are offering JanusGraph deployment waiting for a custom solution to be developed.
- Amazon and Alibaba have decided to create a specialized Timestream database for IoT events and operational applications.
- Storage Services
- All the providers offers a similar portfolio of Block, Object and File storage services even with similar SLA (except Alibaba that is lower)
- Hybrid approaches was the trending topic in the last years.
- In memory Cache
- All providers bet to implement a Redis solution, but they also started to include Memcache in the in memory solution.
However, there are some relevant differences:
- Relational Databases
- Google has developed additional technics like Interleaved tables to improve the performance of his custom solution (Cloud Spanner)
- Amazon offers more options of Market Managed Database and better tools for migrating databases from on-premises
- Azure offers his well know SQL Server as the custom solution with the higher size; 100 TB and good latency.
- The Database sizes in Alibaba are very low (2-16 TB) and the SLA is also below than his competitors (99.9%)
- Non Relational Databases (Key Value, Columnar, Document and Graph)
- Azure is the only cloud provider that has opted to implement a multimodal database with SQL access (Azure Cosmos DB) with homogeneous capabilities and SLA
- Amazon is specializing its non-relational databases to cover very specific tasks that are currently demanded by the market such as; Timestream databases and cryptographically verifiable ledger (Blockchain). In addition Amazon are adding Cache specific solution to his more used Databased like DynamoDB
- Google offers a Pricing model focus on storage and access omitting instances and technical resources required.
- Storage Services
- During 2019-2020 AWS and Azure are making efforts to improve critical hybrid solutions for their customers. However, GCP, which is less sensitive to business needs, has hardly improved in this regard.
- In memory Cache
- Amazon offers the best implementation of Redis with a capacity of up to 250 TB and AZ replication
Finally an option to consider to avoid the lock-in of the implementations of the cloud providers is to bet by multi-cloud market managed database like MongoDB Atlas where you can port your Database to GCP, AWS or Azure platform with very lower impact to the applications.