Who is the better object storage provider for you?
Written by
Louis-Victor Jadavji, Cofounder of Taloflow
Who Should You Choose, and Why?
âś‹ Stick with your principal cloud provider
If you are currently embedded in the Azure or AWS ecosystem for other reasons, there is very little reason to store your data on the other provider. It adds unnecessary complexity and both are similarly expensive for the raw cost of storing data.
🤔 Strongly consider Azure Blob Storage over Amazon S3 if
You use MBCS file formats or need Azure’s more durable object storage, which promises 16 9’s of durability in its Geo-Redundant Storage tier (GRS).
You want to use storage types that automatically replicate your data cross-region.
📝 Other Notes
Both platforms do exceptionally well compared to specialized storage providers in “eventing” (e.g., triggering AWS Lambda or Azure Functions off of storage events).
On Amazon S3, you can also replicate your data cross-region, but it's a feature that needs enabling and can double your raw storage cost.
Besides tiers, Azure has more varied types and versions of storage compared to AWS.
We put all the information below in an interactive quiz to make your object storage provider choice easy.
The data stored in the Azure GRS tier that is replicated to other regions is only available to you in a failover state.
Azure's Geo-redundant Storage (GRS) only replicates your data in a SINGLE zone of two different regions, whereas Azure's Geo-zone Redundant Storage (GZRS) replicates within 3 zones in the primary region and 1 in the secondary region.
Azure Blob Storage Archive requires a minimum retention period of 180 days for files.
Feature Comparison
Feature
Management
IAM is a standard for securely controlling access to resources on the cloud.
Versioning will allow you to retain the old object when it is updated or deleted.
Tags are used to easily sort and categorize objects.
Life cycle management allows you to set rules to manage your objects a certain way.
It keeps a log or trail of changes with sufficient detail for troubleshooting purposes.
A thorough breakdown of costs in billing reports is available.
Performance
If you have a large dataset, you can make many concurrent reads to analyze the data.
When files are smaller thanks to compression, downloads can be faster.
Many storage operations (like reads/downloads) can be simultaneously executed.
How fast you can retrieve your data from an Archival storage class, using this provider? A good rating means you can retrieve your data in less than a minute, while an ok rating provider usually takes a few minutes and a provider with a bad rating on this feature will usually take up to one hour to retrieve data from its Archival storage class.
How fast you can retrieve your data from the (Deepest) Archival storage class, using this provider? A good rating means you can retrieve your data in less than an hour, while an ok rating provider usually takes up to an hour and a provider with a bad rating on this feature will usually take up to 12 hours to retrieve data from its (Deepest) Archival storage class.
Strong consistency keeps your objects consistent across your applications without requiring custom code.
Multipart upload allows you to upload a single object or file as a set of parts. When done in parallel, this can improve throughput by a lot.
Reliability
It ensures durability of your data by replicating your storage write operations across several zones or regions and enables the repair of your data when lost redundancy is detected.
Erasure coding fights off the deterioration of your stored data.
Extra redundancy tiers provide an SLA of usually between 11 and 16 9s of durability.
Security
It allows you to set a lock on the version of your object for a defined period.
It provides an air-gapped solution to insulate from attacks.
It encrypts data at its destination by the receiving app or service.
It encrypts data before transmission from a user device to a server.
A lack of a centralized server by default has some security benefits. However, it is possible to meet a similar standard with a distributed architecture (and more work).
It prevents data from being read or modified by any unintended parties.
Availability
It has storage available in more than three regions.
It has storage that is natively replicated across more than one region.
Use Case Suitability
It supports some of the standard capabilities that are native to Amazon S3.
It supports some of the standard capabilities that are native to Google Cloud Storage.
It gives you the ability to trigger a Lambda or Function off of an event from your storage service.
It allows anyone who meets restrictions to consume the data contained in a storage bucket.
It allows you to egress or download as much data as you want even though you might have to pay for it.
It allows you to store tiny objects (practically no floor).
Most providers will let you store individual files (not broken up) up to 5 TB in size, but some may allow you to store larger files (up to 10 TB).
Rather than using row-based data like what you would typically find in a CSV or JSON, Parquet is an open-source framework for efficient flat columnar data formats.
Filenames can use the MBCS character set.
Pricing Comparison
Integration With Other Services
Not all object storage providers have the integrations or
compatibility with tools like IPFS, Filezilla or specific CDN
providers.
Vendor
CDN
Bunny CDN
Akamai CDN
StackPath CDN
Amazon CloudFront
Beluga CDN
Azure CDN
Cloudflare CDN
Fastly CDN
Google Cloud CDN
IBM Cloud CDN
Backup
Clumio
Acronis
Rubrik
AWS Backup
MSP360
Azure Backup
Veeam
Actifio Go
Duplicacy
Commvault
Comet Backup
Duplicati
Arq
Komprise
Data Analysis
Looker
Metabase
Snowflake
Mode Analytics
Tableau
PopSQL
Azure Synapse Analytics
Amazon Athena
Amazon Redshift
Google BigQuery
File System/Management and Transfer
Rclone
Filezilla
Caringo
IPFS
Iconik
Cyberduck
MinIO
NAS
QNAP
Synology
Database
MongoDB
Migration
Acembly
Compliance Requirements
Compliance with standards like PCI DSS, HIPPA, ISO 27001, CCPA and more have been tracked and recorded..
Louis-Victor Jadavji (or "LV") is a recognized leader in the cloud services industry. He's helped 50+ digital native companies like ModusBox, Later, and NS1 choose the right cloud stack for their applications. His work has been featured in Forbes (30 Under 30 All-Star), HuffPost, The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, and Inc. Magazine.
“Taloflow's buying insights allow us to find and compare new products in verticals like object storage with technical rigor”
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