The simplest way to get started on where to run your workload is to contact the Public Cloud Team and contact us to help you work through your options.  We can help you to work through identifying key architectural needs for evaluating cloud providers.

Some architectural items to consider:

• What kind of networking needs?  Access to campus IPs?
• What does your compute environment look like?  VMs, Containers, serverless, databases?
• Storage needs, protocols that work well, archive or active use storage, or other concerns
• Platform needs, OS or application platforms
• Greenfield work, migrating existing workload?
• Is it a web application that requires authentication?

Does your team have existing experience in one of the public cloud providers?

Do you have a vendor or open source project that defaults to a provider?

Are there any future projects that will suggest a preferred provider later?

For a basic comparison to help possibly narrow down your choices look at the Gartner Cloud Decisions page it will help both assess cost evaluations and service features.  We like the Gartner tool since they maintain the evaluations and the data for us.

* if you have difficulties using the Gartner Cloud Decisions page first log in at https://gartner.wisc.edu