Difference between AWS, Azure, GCP; What Should you Choose?

For quite some time, the cloud computing arena has been dominated by Amazon Web Services or AWS, launched in 2006. Competing against it are Microsoft’s Azure, Google Cloud Platform or GCP. While there are other players in the cloud services space, it is the three services from Amazon, Microsoft and Google that predominate the market.

The automatic question that follows is, how do they compare against each other? But before we stack their capabilities and features against each other, let us look at how AWS, Azure cloud services and GCP have been performing in terms of market share.

Market Position of AWS, Azure and GCP

Amazon’s AWS holds a lion’s share of the market, standing at 33%, which is followed by Microsoft Azure service at 18% and Google Cloud Platform at 9%. Despite the huge difference in market share compared to the leader, both Azure and GCP have done for themselves. According to Microsoft, 90% of all Fortune 500 companies use its cloud platform, while notable consumer brands including Coca-Cola, Dominos, and Philips along with HSBC, Sony Music can be counted among GCP customers. All three platforms dominate the Cloud Infrastructure Services market space, especially IaaS and PaaS, where they have over 40% market share.

AWS vs Azure vs GCP: How they Stack-up against Each Other

Numbers speak for themselves and it’s clear that these are the big three cloud services platforms. Now that we have established that, let us see what their merits and demerits are compared to one another, which will ultimately help you choose the platform that is most suited for your cloud service needs.

Areas of strength

While every platform boosts of the flexibility and scalability, pay-by-usage pricing model (by the second), the best security, high uptime, cost advantages, redundancy backups, etc., what sets each of the three cloud platforms apart are their unique strengths, which also makes them suitable for specific requirements.

AWS: The key strength of AWS can be summed up in a single word. Maturity. Having been in this space for as long as AWS has given it time to develop and perfect its cloud offerings. Amazon’s cloud platform offers several fully-featured services, which currently stands at 175 and covers almost all aspects of IaaS including storage, data analytics, extensive application support and lots more. AWS also has the largest global network, with 77 availability zones in 24 geographic regions, making it highly reliable in terms of availability.

With AWS, you also have the advantage of being a part of AWS Partner Network (APN), which is its global partner program that assists its members with valuable business, technical, and marketing support to help develop and sell your AWS offerings.

Azure: As previously mentioned, Microsoft’s cloud platform is a hit with enterprise customers. This is largely due to Microsoft’s traditional presence in the enterprise services space. When combined with its Office 365 subscription service and Teams, Azure makes a compelling cloud platform package for enterprise storage and cloud computing needs, especially if you are already part of the Microsoft ecosystem.

While engineers could develop and deploy their algorithms on Azure, they also have the convenience of being able to get APIs off-the-shelf at the Azure marketplace.

Being a cloud platform with a focus on enterprises, Azure has strong Iaas and PaaS capabilities. Also, it has some of the best hybrid cloud network options, which is great if you are part of an enterprise that wants to continue maintaining a local cloud for sensitive data and operations.

GCP: An internet powerhouse, thanks to its dominant search engine, Google has the reputation of being a leading developer of AI solutions and developer of widely used open-source technologies like Kubernetes. Google Compute Engine, its IaaS is also the same that runs Google’s own services like Gmail and YouTube. It’s an added advantage that users can also make use of Google’s extensive deep learning library through its services Cloud Machine Learning, Cloud Vision and Speech APIs, Natural Language and Translate APIs.

As clichéd as it might sound, Google’s AI, machine learning capabilities make Google’s cloud computing platform a highly cost-effective option for many businesses. The same can be said about its security infrastructure, which is backed by Google’s decades of experience in maintaining ubiquitous products like Gmail. With GCP, you get the option to opt for G suite integration, which is Google’s version of Office 365.

GCP AI and machine learning tools make it an ideal cloud platform for big-data analytics projects.

Conclusion

Amazon’s AWS is a well-rounded cloud platform that is best suited for most businesses, offering great flexibility in terms of pricing as well as functionalities. Microsoft’s Azure, on the other hand, with its strong enterprise support capabilities, is an excellent choice for businesses that prefer or are comfortable with Microsoft’s ecosystem. Google’s GCP, with its strong machine learning capabilities and support for its Kubernetes and a whole host of open source platforms, has the potential to be a strong cloud competitor to the other two.

If you need further assistance to choose the right cloud platform for your business, LogicEra has the expertise to guide you and help you make the right choice. What’s more, you can also depend on LogicEra for your cloud migration needs in the UAE and London. Our agile cloud computing services can enable your business to utilize cloud-based data to peak efficiency with our expertise and knowledge, without compromising on security.