Serverless Container Service comparison on top three Cloud Platforms (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud)

Overview

The term Serverless Containers is mainly for the customers who can run their containers without having to manage the actual servers or the infrastructure that containers are running on. This helps organizations move from a monolithic architecture to microservices. AWS now offers a Serverless Container service  Fargate, Google offers Cloud Run and Microsoft Azure offers Container Instances.

As a Software entrepreneur, you might not be able to decide which service is the best for your business. The choice depends on several factors such as the type of business applications, the costs involved, and other business requirements. Although users must keep an eye on the usage billing afforded by serverless computing services as it can lead to good and bad surprises.

Prerequisites

• AWS Account
• Basic Knowledge of Serverless Container Services.

Introduction to the services

Let us get a close look at the top three serverless container services that are high in demand in the IT sector.

AWS Fargate

AWS Fargate is a serverless offering on AWS, using which there is no need to bother with scaling, patching, and managing servers on your container clusters. This does not mean that you don’t have control over task execution. You can create the containers such that they use an elastic network interface. This ensures that there are maximum efficiency and speed. Fargate is using an orchestrated cluster, either EKS or ECS. It is not used without an underlying cluster. This service is a good place to start for organizations that do not want the hassle of instance management.

Amazon charges Fargate users’ different price depending on their locations and usage. Someone in Northern California will pay more and a user in Northern Virginia will pay considerably less based on their usage per hour.

Google Cloud Run

Cloud Run is a serverless platform that enables users to run stateless and request-driven containers in a fully managed environment. This Code Run containerizes applications, and scales, and then automatically provisions them. Cloud Run uses the Knative serving API to ensure you can deploy Cloud Run on top of Kubernetes. This increases the efficiency of this service.

Cloud Run comes with a free tier and is pay-per-use, which means the user only pays while a request is being handled on your container instance based on the hour. If it is idle with no traffic, then you no need to pay anything.

Azure Container Instance

Azure serverless containers are the first service in CaaS in the public cloud via Azure Container Instances, which run containers without a Kubernetes cluster. Azure Container Instances also support executing a command in a running container by providing an interactive shell to help with application development and troubleshooting. Access through HTTPS, using TLS to secure user connections.

Azure Containers’ pricing varies depending on the services the user uses. And also, there is no upfront cost for this, and the price depends on the number of vCPU and GBs of memory requested for the container group per second.

Comparison between Serverless Container services

Let us now compare each Service based on all the other aspects.

AWS Fargate vs Google Cloud Run

The AWS Fargate service can launch multiple containers at once and Runs in the AWS public cloud. It uses EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) to run Kubernetes pods and can be configured to auto-scale with Horizontal or Vertical Pod Auto scale. Cloud Run doesn’t directly support Kubernetes pod as a deployable unit. In Google Cloud Run it increases scalability, auto scaling, and other functionalities as well as the ability to easily build REST APIs. It works with any programming language or library. Cloud Run Ability to map services to your custom domains and the ability to choose between Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) or a fully managed service. Cloud Run only schedules one container at a time. If you are running a multi-container pod, the user must launch each container separately.

Google Cloud Run vs Azure Container Instances

Google’s Cloud Run provides a smooth developer experience with auto-scaling, and it is the same with Azure as well. Some of the differences are that only Google Cloud Run supports in-place versioning where traffic is gradually migrated to a new deployment. On the other side, users can only run Windows Instances on Azure. Google Cloud Run and Azure Container Instances both support GPU-based workloads, for example, Google Cloud Run only allows you to spin up single containers, while Azure allows multiple containers to be deployed together.

Azure Container Instances vs AWS Fargate

In Azure users can run the containers easily with a single command. Containerize your application using Docker technology and the user can execute it with one click. In AWS Fargate, the cluster is a logical grouping of tasks or services. So, the cluster resources are fully managed by Fargate. Azure Container Instances has a concept of container groups where it is possible to deploy multiple containers into the same VM. This design is like AWS Fargate it schedules all the containers mentioned in a pod in the same micro VM. The Azure Container Instances meet the needs of their business better than AWS Fargate.

Conclusion

Diving into this comparison, I expected the services to be extremely similar, but they are not. AWS Fargate must improve the developer experience, but Both google Cloud Run and Azure Container Instance focus on the developer experience by hiding the infrastructure operations. When it comes to cost the AWS Fargate is quite expensive and is not well-suited for users who need greater control over their containers than the other two services, so the Azure container Instances and the Google Cloud run services are quite better options for software entrepreneur to start their business.

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