Comparison of Cloud-Computing Providers for Deployment of Object-Detection Deep Learning Models

Abstract

As cloud computing rises in popularity across diverse industries, the necessity to compare and select the most appropriate cloud provider for specific use cases becomes imperative. This research conducts an in-depth comparative analysis of two prominent cloud platforms, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS), with a specific focus on their suitability for deploying object-detection algorithms. The analysis covers both quantitative metrics—encompassing upload and download times, throughput, and inference time—and qualitative assessments like cost effectiveness, machine learning resource availability, deployment ease, and service-level agreement (SLA). Through the deployment of the YOLOv8 object-detection model, this study measures these metrics on both platforms, providing empirical evidence for platform evaluation. Furthermore, this research examines general platform availability and information accessibility to highlight differences in qualitative aspects. This paper concludes that Azure excels in download time (average 0.49 s/MB), inference time (average 0.60 s/MB), and throughput (1145.78 MB/s), and AWS excels in upload time (average 1.84 s/MB), cost effectiveness, ease of deployment, a wider ML service catalog, and superior SLA. However, the decision between either platform is based on the importance of their performance based on business-specific requirements. Hence, this paper ends by presenting a comprehensive comparison based on business-specific requirements, aiding stakeholders in making informed decisions when selecting a cloud platform for their machine learning projects.