Cloud computing has fast become the key driving force for businesses today, as applications are moved out of on-premise data centres to the cloud in order to reduce costs and increase agility.
Under Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) a third-party is responsible for hosting and maintaining the basic infrastructure like hardware, software, servers and storage on behalf of a customer. The applications are hosted in a highly scalable environment and the customers are charged only for the infrastructure used by them.
Today, cloud computing has become an important element of business strategy. There is no longer a question of whether a business should opt for Cloud Computing or not; the biggest question now is which cloud platform is the best and which platform to choose?
The public cloud services landscape is dominated by top companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google. They provide the safest, flexible and consistent managed services. Their cloud platforms offer customers a range of storage, computing and networking options.
Microsoft Azure, AWS (Amazon Web Series) and GCP (Google Cloud Platform) are the top contenders in the fierce battle for cloud dominance.
While selecting public cloud services most of us may only focus on the pricing factor. However, it is important to consider many more factors while choosing the best cloud platform.
In this article, we will try to give a detailed comparative analysis on Google Cloud vs AWS vs Azure. Some of the common features among the three cloud platforms are instant provisioning, self-service, auto-scaling, identity management, security and compliance etc.
Comparing Google Cloud vs AWS vs Azure
Before comparing the three major public cloud services providers, let us first understand each cloud platform.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
Google Cloud Platform GCP is a suite of cloud computing services that helps in deploying and operating applications on the web. It provides a place for individuals and companies to build and run software through the web.
It provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and serverless computing environments. It has an intuitive interface and is highly affordable.
The data and communication channels are completely encrypted including the traffic between data centres.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
The pioneer of cloud computing, Amazon had entered the cloud services market over a decade ago. It offers a range of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings which include computing, database, content delivery and storage, and networking.
Amazon AWS offers subscribers a way to obtain large scale computing capacity more quickly and economically instead of building an actual physical server farm. AWS offers a variety of basic abstract technical infrastructure and distributed computing building blocks and tools.
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure cloud services platform aims at building, organizing and handling several services and applications through the huge network of Microsoft-managed datacenters.
It offers compute services, networking, data management databases and performance. It has extensive networking capabilities that include support for multiple site-to-site connections to virtual networks.
It also has the ability to connect virtual networks across different regions to each other.
Google Cloud vs AWS vs Azure – Pricing models
The pricing model is considered the most important element while choosing a public cloud services provider.
Let us understand the difference between the pricing models of GCP, AWS and Azure to help determine which is the most price-efficient of the three.
We can compare the pricing models by studying their pricing structure on the machine type under 2 different instances.
Google Cloud Platform GCP
- GCP follows the pay-per-second billing option. Under a small instance that involves 2 virtual CPUS and 8 GB RAM, the cost of GCP would be around USD52/month.
- In case of 3.75 TB RAM on 160 virtual CPUS, the cost goes up to USD 5.32/hour. Google offers several discounts that can help customers save up to 50 percent in comparison to the price of AWS.
Amazon Web Services (AWS):
- It offers a pay-per-minute billing option. The pricing model is complex and difficult to get accurate estimates. Though it does offer a cost calculator the number of variables involved makes it difficult to calculate accurate prices.
- In case we consider 2 virtual CPUS with 8 GB RAM it would cost approximately USD 69/month. And in larger instances, with around 84 TB RAM and 128 virtual CPUs the cost of AWS would be around USD 3.97/hour.
Microsoft Azure:
- Azure also offers a pay-per-minute pricing model. The complicated licensing and situation based discount options in the pricing structure of Microsoft makes it very difficult to understand it without help or considerable experience.
- The approximate cost for 2 virtual CPUs and 8 GB RAM is around USD70/month. Whereas on a largescale, 3.89 TB RAM and 128 virtual CPUs costs around USD 6.79/hour.
All three cloud service providers are known to offer discounts up to 75 percent to customers who are ready to commit for a period of one to three years.
Google offers a sustained use discount of up to 30 percent on each instance type if it runs for more than 25 percent every month.
AWS offers a 1-year-free trial to its customers. GCP offers a credit of USD 300 for 12 months along with a free tier which is not time-limited.
This credits model is more suitable for organizations that have recently ventured into cloud services.
Google Cloud vs AWS vs Azure – Compute:
- Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) from AWS handles all the compute services by managing virtual machines having preconfigured settings. The settings can also be configured by the users as required.
- Azure offers Virtual Machines and Virtual Machine scale sets which perform similar functions.
- GCP provides the Google Compute Engine (GCE) whose performance is similar to Elastic Compute Cloud.
Google Cloud vs AWS vs Azure – Storage:
Amazon Web Services (AWS):
- AWS offers Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) that allows the subscriber access to the same systems used by Amazon to run its own websites.
- With Amazon S3, customers can upload, store and download any file that is up to 5 terabytes (TB) in size. A single upload is capped at 5 gigabytes (GB). It is the ideal option for storage of extensive documentation. It offers a proper community support.
Microsoft Azure:
- The Azure Storage platform offers cloud storage solutions. The core storage services offer scalable storage for data objects, disk storage, a cloud file system, a messaging store for reliable messaging etc.
- Azure storage is easily scalable, very flexible and comparatively low in cost. There are 4 key types of storage in Azure:
- File: Managed file sharing for cloud or on-premises arrangements.
- Blob: An object store for storing text and binary data. Supports big data analytics through Data Lake Storage Gen2.
- Queue: Messaging store for reliable messaging between application components.
- Table: NoSQL store for schema-less storage of structured data.
Google Cloud Platform:
- Google Cloud Storage is an object storage service from Google Cloud. It offers combined object storage for live or archived data.
- The objects stored in Google Cloud Storage are grouped into buckets (containers) inside the cloud that can be individually assigned to storage.
- It offers very interesting features like object versioning or fine-grain permissions (per object or bucket), which helps in easy development and reducing the operational overheads.
- Google Cloud Storage is the foundation of several different services offered by Google.
Google Cloud vs AWS vs Azure – Location
All three cloud services providers AWS, Azure and GCP offer great coverage across the world. They ensure peak application performance by trying to manage the smallest possible route to the intended customer base.
- AWS is available in 77 zones
- Azure has a presence in more than 60 regions
- GCP is currently serving 33 countries, with newer regions being added regularly.
AWS has been ruling the cloud market since its launch. It was the pioneer and still holds a majority of the market share in the cloud services market.
- AWS owns around 30 percent of public cloud share across the globe.
- Azure owns around 16 percent and is in second place.
- Google which joined the race last is in third place and owns up to 10 percent of the market share worldwide.
Both Azure and GCP are behind AWS in terms of market share however, when it comes to growth rate they both have shown tremendous growth.
As of 2019 GCP had shown a growth rate of 83 percent whereas Azure displayed a growth rate of 75 percent in the same period. AWS was in third place, with a 41 percent of growth rate.
Key takeaways
AWS has the advantage of being a pioneer in cloud service technology. Azure and GCP are persistently working to overtake AWS and reach the top of the cloud providers list.
Azure and GCP have their own set of strengths. Azure cloud is suitable for several organizations working on MS tools as it allows easy integration of MS tools with Azure cloud.
GCP offers the best pricing model and is the main reason why customers are turning towards it. All things considered, it is not easy to say which is the best cloud providers of the three?
It is better to choose the best-suited cloud provider as per individual needs and requirements.