GCP vs AWS vs AZURE
What’s the difference?
In today’s world, cloud technologies are becoming an integral part to not only enterprise projects, but individuals and small businesses as well. This article will make a comparison between the leading platforms.
Let’s start with Google Cloud Platform. GCP can be more enticing to small businesses and new cloud users because of its user friendly simplicity, dicount core services and a “sustained use” discount model. With GCP you usually only pay for what you’ve used and receive discounts the longer you use it. A big difference between GCP’s “paying for what you use” and the competitor’s “on-demand pricing” is GCP’s customization options for core services such as instances/VMs that let you use highly customized settings to fit more closely to your needs whereas the competitors have less options for customizing these features.
GCP is still catching up with availability and infrastructure, having 73 availability zones in 24 regions which is the least out of the top 3 cloud providers. This may cause less availability or higher latency globally, but many top companies have no problem using this infrastructure within the US and regions near GCP availability zones.
Pricing information should be taken with a grain of salt as the leading cloud platforms are in somewhat of a price war and have been known to cut prices to acquire customers from their competition. Any dollar price comparisons may be out of date by the time you read this article, but that being said, Google Cloud in particular seems to optimize their pricing for core cloud services. For example, Google Cloud Platform has roughly 20% cheaper data storage options than its competitors but has only about half as many services as Amazon Web Service. It may be fair to argue that this changes as Google Cloud Platform continues to develop. The company Spotify recently moved from AWS to GCP because of lower querying costs and discount pricing for the core cloud technologies that they were primarily using.
Before we look at some other platforms let’s quickly touch on the subject of growth between the industry leaders. As you can see in this research done by Canalys, although AWS grew 36% in spending, it fell slightly in market share. Infrastructure as a service is a relatively new industry with many industry leaders still catching up to the first mover, AWS. The dollar value growth between 2018 and 2019 for the leading competitors is almost double that of AWS’s. AWS is still the leading giant of this industry but recent data shows a slowing of its year over year growth.
I think it’s important to point this out in my comparison article because although GCP and Azure may not have the same services or functionality that has brought AWS to the top, it would be fair to argue that the competitors are continuing to adapt and catch up to AWS’s share of the market through their own developments and services. First mover advantage probably plays a big role in this market share dominance as AWS launched in 2006 while Microsoft began development of Azure in 2008 and didn’t have its initial release until 2010.
So let’s dive into the industry leader, Amazon Web Service. AWS is a cloud with an abundance of services and functionality, popular for being first to the cloud platform game and boasting a highly available service and delivery network. Many household names rely almost entirely on AWS’s provided services to run, such as Netflix and Facebook. AWS’s infrastructure consists of 77 availability zones in 24 different regions with several more additions already planned. AWS has always had an emphasis on scaling and elasticity of their resources, making it a top choice for startups that may need to scale their service at a moment’s notice. AWS has 175 different fully featured services provided by AWS that meet the needs of most companies. This list is continually increasing but is already made up of any service you can think of using in the cloud such as SDKs, security and compliance tools, ML tools and more.
AWS features a sliding scale of support plans to meet the customer’s needs. The support plan comes in pricing tiers as basic, developer, business and enterprise. The former having basic customer support functionality and the latter having more involved AWS support such as 24/7 phone support and technical advisors as well as included access to security and compliance services. AWS primarily follows a “pay-as-you-go” pricing model as the other leading platforms do, but also offers discounts for reserved services, analogous to GCP’s “sustained use” discount pricing model.
To finish off, let’s cover the leading competitor to AWS, Microsoft Azure. Microsoft started the launch of their cloud platform late compared to its competitors. Despite this, they’ve had great success, mainly because of how ingrained Microsoft technologies are with modern enterprise businesses. If you have a company depending on the vast array of on-premise Microsoft tools and are considering leveraging the cloud, it would be an easy decision to choose Azure over its competition.
Azure has integrated a large amount of their already existing technologies into their cloud platform, because of this and because of Micorosft’s friendliness towards 3rd party enterprise applications, Azure boasts over 600 different services on their platform. The built in functionality with Microsoft legacy apps plays a part in Azure having increased interoperability with on-premise systems, making it the better cloud provider for businesses interested in hybrid cloud environments. Azure also has an impressive 162 availability zones in 54 regions, making it a top contender for global enterprises.
Azure pricing is more or less competitive with AWS, having slightly less costly prices for general storage and compute services in 2020. Azure introduced the per-minute-billing model for compute instances but the competition has since caught up and have introduced their own granular compute pricing.
As you may have already concluded yourself, the differences between these platforms are not only minimal but constantly changing. If you’re trying to find the right fit for you or your business, there’s no “best” or “worst” cloud between the leaders. It’s best to choose which cloud provider you use based on your business’s functional needs and budget.
A rough summation of these cloud providers would be as follows:
- GCP for a simplistic cloud with discount core services but less total services.
- AWS to meet the needs of any sized businesses that need the extra functionality of their services.
- Azure for enterprise and companies working primarily with Microsoft technologies.
