Cloud computing providers for satellite image processing service: A comparative study

Advanced Earth observation technologies nowadays produce more variety of huge datasets. To derive timely the information from such datasets, remote sensing scientists need to be equipped with a better and powerful computing and storage platform. Cloud computing platform can be a good option, since it provides the required computing power with lowest cost on pay-as-use basis. To see which existing platform shall be suitable for the complex analysis of huge remote sensing data, we present here a comparative study between the most commonly used cloud platforms, Amazon, Microsoft and CloudSigma. Based on the limiting factors that the satellite image-processing task requires, we considered flexibility, scalability, management and pricing. Flexibility means how resilient is the hardware architecture; Scalability describes how the application could utilize from available computing resources to continue well-functioning; Management looks at the availability of dashboards and control panels to manage cloud resources; and Pricing includes the cost of development and running cost of the service on top of cloud platform. Comparison showed that Amazon Web Services transcended all competitors especially in big data processing and scalability attainable options.