Azure Blob Storage vs Google Cloud Storage

Azure Blob Storage 20

No x402, MPP or L402 (0). Per-GB and per-operation prices are public through the Azure Retail Prices API, while the pricing page fills its numbers by script (20). The Azure free account needs a credit or debit card, and no free Blob Storage allowance could be read (0). A person signs up in a browser with a phone number and a card (0).

Google Cloud Storage 30

No x402, MPP or L402 (0). Per-operation and per-GB prices public without login, though the regional storage table draws by script (20). Always Free covers 5 GB-months and small operation counts in three US regions, but a Google Cloud billing account is needed; whether a card is required wasn't confirmed today (10). A person creates the project and billing account in a browser (0). 0 + 20 + 10 + 0 = 30.

Azure Blob Storage 88

Hosted reading. Azure status page with a history of post-incident reviews (20). The history, re-read on 1 November, lists two incidents in the 90 days from 3 August and none after 1 October, Azure OpenAI and Cognitive Services on 29 September, and gateway services in several regions from 20:30 UTC on 30 September to 02:15 UTC on 1 October. The West US review of 23 July has left the window. None names Storage. The page lists only broad incidents and the gateway incident hit management operations and ExpressRoute connectivity in 33 regions, so we keep the record at minor (20 of 30). Targets published with numbers, 20,000 requests a second per standard account, 40,000 in 29 named regions, and 3,000 a second on one block blob (15). 503 Server Busy and 500 Operation Timeout are documented with advice to back off exponentially, the Python client retries three times by default, and If-None-Match: * makes a retried write safe. No Retry-After header was found in the pages read (13 of 15). The SLA document of 1 October 2026 commits to 99.9 per cent on the hot tier, 99.99 per cent for reads on RA-GRS accounts, with 10 and 25 per cent credits (10). Generally available (10). The targets, retry guide and SLA are per the 17 October check, not re-read on 1 November.

Google Cloud Storage 80

Google Cloud's status dashboard with a per-product incident feed (20). In the 90 days from 8 August, Cloud Storage appears in a high-severity incident on 20 August across 27 products (about 3 hours 40 minutes of timeouts and errors), a medium incident on 8 to 9 October with elevated upload and write errors, and a medium regional incident in europe-west2 on 20 October. One major outage (10). The request-rate guide gives numbers, no ramp-up needed below 1,000 writes or 5,000 reads a second per bucket, with gradual ramping above (15). The retry strategy page lists retryable responses, idempotent operations and preconditions that make writes safe to retry, and the client libraries back off exponentially (15). SLA with monthly uptime of 99.95 per cent for multi-region Standard and 99.9 per cent regional (10). Generally available, and the MCP server since 20 April 2026 (10). 20 + 10 + 15 + 15 + 10 + 10 = 80.

Azure Blob Storage 80

Read as a closed service with official SDKs. azure-storage-blob 12.31.1, a patch fixing UTC conversion in SAS generation and the redaction of some headers in DEBUG logs, is dated 20 October 2026 in its changelog, and the versioning page was updated on 29 October (30). Five Python releases in the 90 days from 3 August, 12.30.1 on 27 August, 12.30.2 on 16 September, 12.30.3 on 22 September, 12.31.0 on 30 September and 12.31.1 on 20 October (20). A versioning page and per-version change pages, Microsoft Q&A and the SDK issue trackers on GitHub, which we did not read (10 of 15). Official SDKs current in Python (12.31.1) and JavaScript (12.34.0, the newest tag on 1 November), and the Java batch library patched for CVE-2026-88094 (15). The SDKs are released from the azure-sdk monorepos, CI not checked (5 of 10). Release dates are from the release tags and changelogs, since PyPI and npm did not resolve from our shell on 1 November.

Google Cloud Storage 88

Release notes on 4 November 2026 (30). Entries on 30 October, 13 October, 30 September, 10 September and 3 September (20). A closed service with dated release notes and paid support; issue trackers for the client libraries are public (15). Official client libraries in many languages (15). Libraries ship with end-to-end checksums by default since 30 September (8). 30 + 20 + 15 + 15 + 8 = 88.