Amazon S3 vs Google Drive [closed]

Question

The majority of people use S3. However, Google Drive seems a promising alternative solution for storing large amounts of data. Are there specific reasons why one is better than the other?

Answer 1

Personally, we use S3 on top of GCE and really love it. Depending on how much data you're dealing with, Google Drive just doesn't quite match the 5 TB max that S3 gives you. Also, if you're using python, boto does a pretty fantastic job of making most aws services pretty accessible regardless of what stack you're dealing with. Even if you're not using python, they've got a pretty straightforward API that generally is more accessible than Google Drive.

Instead of google drive, though google did recently release a cloud storage service, apart from drive, that lets you more closely integrate your storage with any gce instance you've got, https://cloud.google.com/products/cloud-storage/

They've got an API which seems to be pretty comparable to S3's, but I can't profess to having really played around with it much. Pricing-wise the two are identical, but I think that the large community and experience with aws in general still puts S3 squarely above both google's cloud storage and google drive.

Answer 2

From our perspective on here, the big benefit of S3 is the ease of accessing the data from within EC2.

Google Drive is directly accessible from the Google Cloud platform.

There are a host of other differences that might matter depending on your usage requirements, but that's the one that would matter most around here.

The only other difference I can think of that would matter to the DS community is that when you are sharing something, you have no control of the address of a given file on google drive.