Comparison Between AWS Outpost Vs. Azure Stack Vs. Google Anthos Hybrid Storage's.

Hello there, in this article I am going to tell a little something I learned on different Storage Technologies; Mainly about the core features of AWS Outpost / Azure Stack / Google Anthos Hybrid before focusing on the storage services each provides. Normally in our day to day life everyone has to make different choices according to their needs, for example what to wear?, what to eat?, etc; While saying so many of you will think 'why am i talking about choices we make in our day to day when i am supposed to talk on the topic of Storage Technologies?'. Well the thing is when we want to make a particular choice for what we want many times we are not able to choose and most of the time people hate making a single choice, so they'll usually opt for something that promises the best of both worlds.

In the same way, IT leaders and business executives are no different when it comes to choosing a particular storage technology, as there are so many options but each and every one of them comes with their own respective advantages and disadvantages; So it is sometimes hard to decide, which explains why most organizations have adopted hybrid cloud strategies that does the work of combining public cloud services and private infrastructure into a centrally managed, consistent cloud environment to make it work more efficiently.

Until quite recently, the term hybrid cloud was supposedly so loosely defined that it was applied to any organization who are using at least one public and one private cloud environment, regardless of whether they were to do the work of connecting or enabling workloads to seamlessly migrate from one to another. However, nowadays leading cloud providers have started to introduce integrated systems that enable cloud services that were previously only available on shared infrastructure and now are able to deploy on dedicated hardware in an organization's data center, branch offices or other facilities respectively.

• Some of these, like VMware vCloud and Red Hat OpenShift, originated as private cloud software stacks that extended to shared service providers.
• Others, notably AWS Outposts, Microsoft Azure Stack and Google Anthos, started as public cloud services and adapted to enterprise hardware that can quickly deploy anywhere an organization needs dedicated cloud resources.

According to the "Flexera 2021 State of the Cloud Report," adoption of Azure Stack -- the oldest unified hybrid cloud system -- is said to exceed that of its primary cloud competitors, but AWS Outposts and Google Anthos are catching up fast. When the survey combined current, experimental and planned deployments, a scant 11 points separated the three.

The hybrid offerings that are provided from these three domestic hyperscale cloud providers are quite popular due to their tight integration and management of public and private infrastructure, consistent service APIs and centralized management interfaces.

Core features:

The table that is shown below summarizes the primary features of each product. Outposts most of the time are said to have the largest variety of selection of public cloud services, while on the other hand Anthos mainly focuses is on container infrastructure that users can deploy on multiple platforms.

Storage services comparison:

As the table above illustrates, the storage services vary widely. Here are the key elements for each product.

AWS Outposts -

AWS Outpost most of the time provides the purest duplication of cloud-based storage services by offering local instantiations of Elastic Block Store (EBS) and Amazon S3 object storage. Outposts racks are normally already configured from the start, while also adding a mix of Elastic Compute Cloud instance capacity and EBS storage volumes in a variety of configurations that span the following capacity tiers:

• EBS: 11 TB, 33 TB and 55 TB
• S3: 26 TB, 48 TB, 96 TB, 240 TB and 380 TB

Azure Stack Hub configurations -

Azure Stack Hub include all-NVMe, a mix of NVMe and SSD or hybrid HDD-NVMe, or SSD. All-flash installations can normally be either single-tier or dual-tier (caching plus bulk storage). Storage Spaces Direct is kind of quite a versatile, scale-out, software-defined storage that supports three volume types:

• Infrastructure volumes host files using hosted VMs and Azure Stack core services.
• VM Temp volumes host temporary disks attached to tenant VMs.
• Object store volumes host tenant data servicing blobs, tables, queues and VM disks.

Google Anthos platform -

The Google Anthos platform mostly do not provide native storage services, but instead it relies on the underlying VM or bare-metal servers. For example, Anthos that would be running on VMware should typically access a vSAN or might select a similar scale-out software-defined storage to be able to access the required block volumes, network file shares and object stores via Kubernetes container storage drivers respectively. CSI drivers have been available for a variety of cloud and software-defined storage services.

Concluding:

Here, I would like to conclude my article, by mentioning there last few things on this topic. When evaluating these hybrid products, it is very important to remember and understand that each one of them target different needs and audiences to their respective Clients.

• Outposts are mainly best for heavy AWS users, particularly those who would like to reduce their data center footprint, but for performance or compliance reasons would have the need to keep some data and applications on private infrastructure accordingly.
• Azure Stack targets enterprises that have standardized on Microsoft system and application software and want to extend their Azure IaaS environments to locally installed and managed hardware.
• Google Anthos appeals to organizations that have decided to make containers and the Kubernetes ecosystem the foundation of their enterprise applications and want container environments that can span multiple public and private clouds. Anthos also runs on AWS or Azure.