Azure Functions Vs AWS Lambda Vs Google Cloud Functions

 

Serverless computing has been gaining popularity. According to the report, it is the fastest growing extended cloud service, at 75% rate year over year. And so led to more curiosity and the use of serverless architecture. The days of storing information over an in-house database are far gone. Serverless is one of the trending technologies today. There are some serverless platforms to store data, some of these are, AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions and Microsoft azure. Selecting the best platform depends on factors like performance, functionality, pricing etc. Because of the availability of lots of platforms, you should know the clear difference between those so let us compare AWS Lambda vs Azure Functions vs Google Cloud Functions.

Azure Functions Vs AWS Lambda Vs Google Cloud Functions-

1. Language Support & Deployment-

Azure Functions–

Azure provides 2 levels of language support- Generally Available (GA) level and Preview level. It supports C#, JavaScript, Python, Powershell, F#, Java version 8 and 11, and Typescript based on the runtime versions 1.x, 2.x and 3.x. Azure also supports direct deployment from .zip file packages. It promotes deployment through FTP, Cloud sync, Local Git, JSON templates and Continuous deployment. 

AWS Lambda–

AWS Lambda provides native support for Golang, Java, PowerShell, Node.js, C#, Python and Ruby. It’s runtime API allows the use of any programming language to develop customized functions. Simple, lambda supports various languages by creating container images through the said Runtime APIs. Simply creating .zip file archives of functional code and dependencies, eases the deployment of Lambda package. Integrating Amazon Storage Services, you can deploy libraries other than AWS SDK with Lambda.

Google Cloud Functions–

Google Cloud Functions eases writing in Node.js, Golang, Java, Python, and .NET frameworks like C#, F#, and Visual Basic. In cloud functions, runtime plays an important role as it does in AWS Lambda. The main difference is that the environment executions of Cloud Functions vary based on the runtime model chosen. Packages from cloud functions are deployed from Cloud Source Repos, Local machine, source control and APIs.

2. Persistent Storage-

Azure Functions–

With advanced programming, handling storage gets a little overwhelming with Azure, but it has upgraded the storage services. One can get about 40 TB to 500 TB of offline data storage transfer through its cloud solution Data Box.

AWS Lambda–

AWS Lambda sets limits for computing and persistent storage resources. This method is applied to all functional layers, deployment packages, container images, execution processes, test events among others. By default, it provides 1k concurrency executions, 75 GB storage for functions and layer storage. In spite of the limit, the storage quota is expanded to a few terabytes upon submitting a manual request to AWS Console support for functional scaling. Lambda provides storage options as Amazon’s S3, EFS, and DynamoDB.

Google Cloud Functions–

Google cloud functions provides simple control over the storage through their in-house Cloud Storage while it also offers the possibility to use Firebase. 

3. Dependencies Management-

Azure Functions–

Azure employs an extensible application performance management service to measure, control and manage dependencies. The SDK of APM services permits azure to automatically track dependency calls for Http/Https, WCF, SQL, Cosmos DB etc.

AWS Lambda–

Lambda’s execution environment has various libraries like AWS SDK that includes new packages and functions. Code organization and use of Dependency injections methods and Inversion of Control(IoC) frameworks like Dagger, Guice, Spring reduces the complexity of dependencies.

Google Cloud Functions–

Monitoring, handling and accessing dependencies in Google Cloud functions depends on the language chosen and the runtime module integrated.  Whereas, with cloud functions, you could request and include any system package to handle the dependency via Go modules’ execution environment conveniently. 

4. Identity & Access Management-

Identity & Access Management system enables authorization layer to exercise fine-grained access management for functions. With Aws Lambda you can create your own custom IAM policies and assigns specific roles as per the user behavior. IAM of lambda has 3 policies: Role, Read-Only Access, Full-Access. Whereas, for IAM computing services, Lambda allows only partial access to service-linkedin roles and doesn’t give authorization-based tags. One can control your function policies through Resource Based Access Control. Now it provides three essential services, IAM for cloud and hybrid-based environment, Consumer Cloud IAM, and Virtual Machines for effective IAM.

GCF provides enterprise-grade level access control and it uses Google’s cloud resources to create security policy according to your requirement and compliance processes. Also, it offers a granular level of IAM via context-aware access, protecting attributes in each resource and IP address with continuous update on security status.

5. Scalability & Availability-

Azure Functions–

Azure function is available with two different plans- Consumption plan and App service plan. Consumption plan scales your function automatically when a function execution times out after a configurable interval. App service plan runs functions on a dedicated VMs allotted to each function app, that implies the host of functions are always up and running.

AWS Lambda–

AWS Lambda supports dynamic scalability according to the increased traffic. To effectively manage traffic increase, AWS Lambda predetermines the number of functions to be carried out according to the region on which it is executed. Near about 500 to 3K functions executed per region.

Google Cloud Functions–

With Google Functions, the background functions scale gradually, and it relies upon the function duration. Likewise, most extreme adaptability depends on as far as possible. Maximum scalability is based on the traffic limits.

6. Concurrency And Execution Time-

Concurrent execution count varies according to the type of event source you have used. Based on the incoming request rate, functions scale automatically, but not all resources in your application’s architecture work the similar way. So concurrency depends on downstream resources.

Azure Functions–

Azure supports various functions simultaneously provided operations take place simultaneously within a single data partition. The number of simultaneous activity and executions is covered at 10X depending on the number of cores in the VM level. The execution time limit is 600 seconds or 10 minutes.

AWS Lambda–

AWS Lambda limits the total concurrent executions across the functions to 1000. One can limits the concurrency in two ways: account level or individual functional level. Functional execution timeout is 900 seconds or 15 min.

Google Cloud Functions–

Google cloud function receives only upto 80 concurrency executions and the execution time between 60seconds and 540 seconds. 

7. Logging And Monitoring-

Azure Functions–

Azure has in-built Azure Application insights which monitors functions. It is generally replaced by built-in lagging system.

AWS Lambda–

AWS lambda monitors functions by reporting metrics through Amazon CloudWatch which includes various requests, latency per request and number of requests resulting in an error. It integrates with Amazon CloudWatch Logs and pushes them from code to a CloudWatch group with Lambda function. One can make use of AWS X-Ray to provide end-to-end monitoring for functions. 

Google Cloud Functions–

Google Stackdriver is a suite of monitoring tools which helps you to understand what’s happening in the Cloud Functions. It has in-built tools for logging, reporting errors and monitoring. One can see execution counts, execution times and memory usage in GCP Console also.

Microsoft Azure IoT hub vs AWS IoT

The enormous cloud duo have entered the Internet of Things (IoT) space. Each one is offering new services and investing in their IoT platforms. The smart cities will have a strong effective future in which IoT and analytics plays an important role in both private and public services. Let us compare Microsoft Azure IoT hub vs AWS IoT.

Microsoft Azure IoT vs AWS IoT

What is IoT?

IoT is an abbreviation of Internet of Things. It refers to the continuous growing network of physical objects that feature an IP address for internet connectivity. It also feature the communication that occurs between these objects and other Internet-enabled devices and systems. Microsoft Azure IoT and AWS IoT are the most famous IoT services among all. IoT has a potential to manage lighting, parking, waste management. Smart city revolution is about connecting people, process, data and things through technology to enable more efficient, smarter living. IoT has potential to develop cities with technology.

Microsoft Azure IoT-

Microsoft’s cloud solution is Microsoft Azure. It offers a substantial number of cloud services, including mobile app services, storage offerings, messaging platforms and virtual machines. It enables not only reliable but also secure bi – directional communication between millions of IoT devices and a solution back end. Azure Con 2015 launched Azure IoT on Sept 29, 2015. It offers plenty of products targeted for use in IoT product development. According to price, Azure IoT is cheaper than AWS IoT platforms.

Features of Azure IoT-

Azure IoT Hub –

IoT Hub also supports numerous open- source SDKs, including .NET, Javascript, Java, C and Python. IoT Hub is the focal territory for developers to develop IoT applications and to connect, monitor and also to analyze. It can manage billions of edge devices with the help of bi – directional messaging. It is a flexible cloud platform as a service (PaaS) that supports multiple protocols (AMPQ, MQTT and HTTP). If a device does not support any one of these protocols then incoming and outgoing traffic can be adjusted using the Azure IoT protocol gateway.

Some of the central features include the use of authentication control per device, bidirectional communication between IoT devices using device- to- cloud telemetry data, and the ability to accelerate the deployment and scaling of IoT services by registering and provisioning devices using zero touch. It allows developers to pack their cloud workloads and run them locally on devices using Azure IoT edge. According to prize, it is grouped into 4 categories including free tiers which has up to the high throughput S3 tier, capable of  supporting up to 300,000,000 messages per day. Each tier added by extra units for more throughput. Messages are sent in 4 KB blocks, for billing purposes. A message upto max 512 KB is count as each block.

Azure IoT Edge –

IoT Edge stretches cloud intelligence and analytics to edge devices at a local level. It expands the deployment of AI, Azure services, and custom logic directly to cross-platform IoT devices. With AWS, the IoT when deployed via Azure IoT Edge can run securely and efficiently even when the devices are offline. IoT Edge has extremely low latency and near real-time response potential, thereby optimizing performance between edge and cloud. It works with the AI Toolkit for Azure IoT Edge. This means that, complex AI and ML tasks such as image recognition and complex event processing can easily run without the need to write them in-house. One of the biggest risks for both customers and enterprises is to secure the data. Hence, Azure has consistently been at the forefront of cyber-security as compared to AWS.

Azure IoT central-

Azure IoT Central is built on the enterprise- grade Azure services that allow integration with existing business processes and systems. It is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) for IoT. And also is a fully managed solution. This means is that, the users without any coding or development skills can build production-grade IoT applications. It is very quick to deploy production-grade IoT applications and ensures to eliminate the need for management of infrastructure and hiring developers with specific skills.This makes Azure IoT Central one of the best platforms for IoT development. It is operated with an interface that allows developers to connect, manage and control access to millions of connected products remotely across their entire life-cycle.

Azure IoT Solution Accelerators –

It is a customizable set of templates for common IoT scenarios such as remote monitoring, a connected factory and predictive maintenance. There is a connected device simulation accelerator, which allows developers to test- run their chosen IoT solution with tens of thousands of simulated devices over the development cycle.

AWS IoT-

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the public cloud leader and it has been putting a lot of effort into cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI) and IoT for a long time now. It provides IoT services through its AWS IoT platform, which comes with a broad set of tools. It offers many solutions that span edge to the cloud, allow developers for most of the use cases over a wide range of devices. These solutions consist of local data collection and analysis, devices and cloud services to store and analyze device data.

The AWS IoT stage is more costly than its adversaries, however in general, AWS is essentially in ahead of the others in terms of market share of the cloud computing space. Devices can communicate with applications running in the cloud over HTTP, MQTT and also WebSockets. This communication can secured with the use of TLS. Device specific SDKs are available for Embedded C, JavaScript, Python, iOS, Android and Arduino Yun. Device shadow is a device that connects with AWS. It maintains the identity and last known state of a specific device and acts as a channel to send and receive messages.

AWS IoT Services-

Amazon FreeRTOS –

Amazon FreeRTOS is a microcontroller operating system. This focuses on allowing easy programming and management of small, low-power edge devices. It is based on the FreeRTOS kernel, an open source operating system for microcontrollers. AWS’ service extends the free version with software libraries which allows easy connections between small and low-power devices (such as appliances, fitness trackers and automobiles) with AWS’ wider set of cloud services, such as AWS IoT Core or to other bigger edge devices running AWS Greengrass.

Microcontrollers (MCUs) are single chips consisting of a simple processor. They have limited memory capacity and compute power and so they can only perform simple, functional tasks. Generally microcontrollers can not run on operating systems with built in functionality to connect to the cloud or local networks. This makes IoT services more challenging. Amazon FreeRTOS was built to solve this problem by allowing to connect the core operating system with software libraries. It makes a secure connection to the cloud easy.

AWS Greengrass –

It is software that securely allows the running of local compute, data caching and messaging for connected devices. Connected devices can run AWS Lambda functions via AWS Greengrass. It also enables the keeping of device data in synchronized and securely communicating with other devices even though not connected to the internet.  This means that Greengrass connected IoT devices can still respond quickly to local events, interact with local resources (via Lambda functions), stay updated and minimize the costs associated with transmitting IoT data to the cloud. Devices can then act locally on the data they are generating in addition to using the cloud for backup storage, management and analytics.

AWS IoT Core –

It is AWS’ overseen cloud stage that allows the clear and secure interaction between connected devices, cloud applications and other devices, the thought being to permit the simple structure of IoT applications, for example, associated home or industrial solutions. Also, IoT Core has the functionality to support billions of devices and trillions of messages. This also includes the processing and routing of those messages to AWS endpoints and other devices. IoT Core also connects to AWS IoT Analytics, which empowers the building of analytics and machine learning models.

Final Words-

The IoT market will grow over the years, and demand for IoT developers and IoT development services will also increase. There are various IoT technologies and platforms are available to build IoT projects. Therefore, it becomes complicated for developers and enterprises to select the best one. So we have compared the AWS IoT and Azure IoT to make things easier.

If you’re interested in migrating to the cloud, then we’re more than happy to help you get started. Solace is there to help you for cloud platform. We believe in benefits of using Microsoft azure and AWS IoT. We will provide the means to bring your company the success it deserves. Contact us for incorporating azure or AWS in a business.

Drupal 8 on azure 7 reasons why it is a match made in heaven

https://solaceinfotech.com/blog/benefits-of-drupal-8-on-azure/
First of all, Drupal 8 is the greatest release of Drupal. It is the most widely used enterprise web content management system. Developers like it and prefer for its speed and flexibility also. The main platform of Drupal has more than 200 in built features to help businesses to create memorable digital experiences.

Drupal 8

Drupal 8 offers mobile-first approach and also supports responsive design. The content authoring in Drupal is easier. Drupal 8 helps in creating great online experiences for audiences across the globe with better globalization and multi-lingual support. Drupal 8 is being adopted twice as fast as Drupal 7 had been. Code of Drupal 8 includes object-oriented classes, interfaces, inheritance. It uses PHP standards and requires at least PHP 5.5. 

Most common question is- Which is the right platform for hosting Drupal websites? There is not a complete solution which fits it all. Drupal 8 sites on Azure gives many business benefits. 

Benefits of Drupal 8 on Azure-

Azure, the cloud platform operated by Microsoft, is an high-level hosting environment providing:

• Managed web server instances (Web Worker Role)
• Database services (SQL Azure)
• Similarly, File storage and distribution (Azure Blob Storage)
• CDN and caching for both the web server instances and the file distribution
• Simple object storage (Azure Table)
• And other related services (less useful for Drupal)

Reasons why Microsoft Azure is a good platform for Drupal hosting- 

1. Drupal Web App- 

It is very easy and also simple to migrate a Drupal website to Azure Web App. By following some easy steps, complete Drupal site can be moved within an hour. These simple steps include the creation of Azure website, the creation of MySQL database and copying it to Azure Web Apps and developing the code using version control tools such as Git BitBucket.

2. Pre-Installed Drupal Tools- 

Developers using some popular version control tools such as Git and BigBucket. Azure has made these tools available pre-installed with just only plug-and-play with its platform. By using this, developers can continue to use these tools of their choice and also improve their development workflows.

3. Ready modules for authentication, file storage-

There are various ready made modules accessible in Drupal for commonly used tasks, For eg., authentication, controlling access and likewise distributed file storage. With the use of such modules, developers can save a lot of development time and as a result influence the ready made connectivity with Azure platform. Many of these modules uses libraries of Microsoft and these are stable and scalable also. 

4. Caching tools-

Those websites having heavy content need to use caching tools. These tools are used to provide better search options for a hazard free user experience. Varnish and Memcache are caching tools and search experience enhancers like Apache Solr are popular within developers community. These tools are available as plug-ins with Microsoft Azure. It makes easy to integrate with the websites and also to increase the speed of website. 

5. Application performance management with application insights-

Application insights is most useful service for web developers. This service helps developers to monitor the performance of their live web applications. It identifies the performance issues. Similarly, it provides necessary analytics tools to help the developers to analyze issues and use of application by the end users. With the use of insights, developers can continuously improve the performance. Insights can also improves the usability of their application. Application insights is correctly hosted within Microsoft Azure. It is free to use until the application has significant use.

6. Premium Partnership-

Microsoft Azure is Premium Technology supporter for Drupal. By this partnership it is more easy and also simple for Drupal developers to instantly start using Windows and Linux Virtual Machines, apps and infrastructure within Microsoft-managed data centers around the world. Using Visual Studio tools, developers can develop and debug apps fast. Due to the features such as built-in auto-scaling and pre-minute billing, organizations that uses Drupal can save money and agile.

7. Used by industries-

Not only organizations but also educational institutes are using the combination of Drupal and Azure for their web applications. For eg.,

1. Group INSEEC- It is one of the biggest international professional training providers which delivers high-quality training not only for luxury but also for hospitality customers.

2. Shezlong- It is an Egypt-based startup which offers online psychotherapy for millions of sufferers.

3. ESADE Business School- It is one of the major international professional training providers. So it delivers high-quality training and hospitality customers. 

Final Words-

If you are searching for a hassle-free Drupal hosting, you should go with the various options provided by Microsoft Azure. It is highly secure and also offers great performance for delivering seamless digital experiences through your Drupal web application. Microsoft offers well documentation and videos for quick assistance.

Are you looking to develop a website for your business? We have a dedicated team that believes in benefits and effectiveness of hosting drupal website on azure platform. Develop a website with Solace that will help you to set you on your way to success of business. Contact us for your effective website development to stand out in the market.