What is the difference between Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services?

This comes as no surprise that cloud computing is the talk of the town and every organization, big or small, has come to terms with the fact that they need cloud to ensure success. The quick adoption and acceptance of cloud has in fact proved to be a driving force for most businesses today facilitating less cost of working, better innovation and heightened agility.

We are certain you must have already heard of and done your share of research about Internet – as- a- Service, which is better known as IaaS in the tech world. This model constitutes a third- party provider responsible for hosting and maintaining all core infrastructure including, but not limited to storage, hardware, servers and software, all on the behalf of the customer. With high scalability as one of the key factors, customers profit by only having to pay for what they use, amongst other ways.

Whenever there is a big technology at play, there are big players playing the field. In the case of cloud computing, the ball generally falls into either of the following – Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. These three are names of the biggest public cloud vendors and have helped millions of businesses in handling and changing how they see data security and sovereignty.

While AWS has been one of the strongest and fiercely going candidates for a long time now, Microsoft Azure has come a long way and gained a lot of traction, thanks to its CEO, Satya Nadella’s “cloud first” leadership and approach.

And of course, how can one forget about the internet giant that Google is and its consistent soaring with Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

But is the market really shifting or has it already taken a shift? The question is a tricky one and the answer, definitely subjective. Thus, instead of taking a hit at who is better than who, we are going to explore further by giving you insights on what is the difference between Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.

Enterprises seek to take down the road of the top cloud provider and when necessary, they do not shy away from diving into multi- cloud environments. With multiple benefits to offer such as scalability, better availability, decreased CapEx and lower infrastructure maintenance, amongst others, it sometimes helps to know which one is better for a business for best outcome.

In order to ensure you have chosen the very best for your enterprise, it is best to get started with your research to pin to the best one possible. While the answer as to which one is the best highly subjective, we can still try to make a comparative list and get things settled.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Google Cloud Platform or GCP offered by Google is an aspect of the overarching Google Cloud. It has been available to the general public since 2010.

As of now, Google Cloud Platform offers more than 100 services to its users across areas of big data, networking, computing and much more. Chrome OS, enterprise Android and Google Workshop are some of the top services by GCP.

When compared to its competitors, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform can be said to be the smallest. In spite of that, it has some of the most robust set of cloud services to offer that can power and support any type of application.

With many things to offer including lower costs, flexible compute options, intuitive interface, and preemptible instances, Google Cloud Platform is one of the finest alternatives one could ask for instead of both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. Google is also known for its utilization of full- scale encryption of all communication channels and data, along with the traffic between data centres.

In comparison with AWS, Google Cloud stands strong in terms of traffic and privacy security, machine learning, payment and instance configurability and cost efficiency.

Also, Google Cloud Platform is said to be better for companies beginning their journeys in the cloud services.

Some of its notable customer list includes –

• Paypal
• Toyota
• Nintendo
• Target
• Unilever
• Spotify
• UPS
• Twitter
• The Home Depot

Microsoft Azure

The Microsoft Azure platform has been designed keeping in mind several factors including building, managing and deploying of a myriad of services as well as applications via the humongous network of Microsoft- managed datacentres. While the offerings of Microsoft Azure are too many to state here, they include data management databases, networking, performance and networking.

With Azure Site Recovery, organizations ranging from small to big are enabled with the opportunity to orchestrate site- to- site replica as well as recover data to VMs hosted on Azure itself. Data storage redundancy or Zone Redundant Storage (ZRS) are also offered by Azure and that too across various data centre regions.

With Azure ExpressRoute, the connectivity of data centre with Azure gets facilitated via a private link. Since the internet is not used, higher level of security and privacy is achieved, leading to lower latency and greater reliability.

Another important thing offered by Azure includes an extensive networking, which it is highly capable at. This includes supporting multiple site- to- site connections with virtual networks. It also showcases its prowess at connecting virtual networks parallelly across various regions to one another.

But this is not all, Microsoft Azure also exudes lowest on- demand pricing. At this price, it offers over 200 services and products and has been considered as one of the most rapidly growing cloud platforms. As of now, it is only second to Amazon Web Services, but who knows what the future holds?

Azure has always made headlines because it has never been limited to only Windows- based services. In fact, it supports various platforms, technologies and open- source languages, which facilitates anyone and everyone to build as well as support any application.

Some of the most popular brands that use Azure include –

• Mitsubishi Electronics
• McKesson Group
• HSBC
• Renault
• DAIMLER AG
• ASOS
• Starbucks
• National Health Service (NHS) – UK
• Centre of Disease Control (CDC) – US
• HP

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Considered to a pioneer in the world of cloud computing, Amazon was the first to step into the world of cloud services market more than a decade ago. Today, it is said to be a leader, both in terms of number of customers, gentry of its clients as well as the products it has to offer to them. Amazon Web Services, better known as AWS, has set a very high benchmark when it comes to the cloud service quality.

Amazon Web Services has quite a wide range of IaaS or Infrastructure- as- a- service offerings, which can further be segregated into database, networking, storage, content delivery and computing.

By employing AWS management tools such as Amazon CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail, the cloud infrastructure resource usage can be easily monitored. This tracks the AWS config and the user activity to help manage the changes and the resource inventory.

Serverless services such as AWS Lambda, AWS SQS Queues, and Amazon Kinesis Streams are enabled by AWS to ensure smooth as well as flexible data collection flow. This gives enterprises the option of choosing the operating system, programming language, database, and the web application platform, amongst many other depending upon their requirements.

While Amazon Web Services does still have a few drawbacks such as default service limits and a complex infrastructure, it is still the one that can lead an organization to great heights of success through enhanced business growth and productivity. Maybe this is one of the main reasons why organizations of all sorts and nature use Amazon Web Services, including governments, large enterprises and individual developers.

Today, Amazon Web Services offers over 200 fully- features services designed in such a manner so as to cater to every demand the user makes, which are quite well in millions.

Amazon Web Services has many prominent customers including –

• Netflix
• Coca cola
• Airbnb
• Coursera
• Expedia
• Formula 1
• Lyft
• Coinbase
• Intuit

Conclusion

Putting a conclusion to which one is better and which one is not is a highly difficult task, which is definitely not possible to figure out objectively. Every organization must figure out which one is the best for them and who they wish to go ahead with depending upon their individual needs and the offerings available.

While it is no surprise that Amazon Web Services has some of the most widely used and well- rounded services to offer, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform are not far behind. In fact, when talking about an individual firm or a starting out enterprise, Google Cloud Platform seems to be the best suited. One may proceed with the AWS Training and certification to lead in this technolgy.

Thus, all we can say is that the future for each is bright, even though their journeys are nothing like one another’s. The customer list of each is quite impressive and depending upon the kind of enterprise you have, choosing becomes easier. If you are not fully satisfied with just one, you can always choose to go with multi- cloud environments.