War for the cloud.

suhaib ahmed
Sep 6, 2018 · 4 min read

While it’s difficult to choose between public, private and hybrid cloud strategies, there is a bigger matter that must be dealt with equally: AWS or Google Cloud or Azure. Which cloud service should you go with? I want to share their stories and hope you can get a feel for each.

AWS is dominating public cloud over MS Azure and Google since 2006 when it started offering services.If Microsoft was the pioneer of personal computing, AWS is that of cloud computing. It emphasized the importance of moving into the cloud with innovations like pay-as-you-go pricing models, elastic computing, cross-region presence and horizontal scaling. The industry was battling pain points of massive up-front costs, hiring IT staff and in-house knowledge limits and cloud computing was the valiant savior.

AWS carved the blueprint for building your cloud presence — starts with picking a region and availability zone, provisioning your server, configuring your services and expanding to other regions and availability zones. Renowned for its maturity, it’s offerings spread evenly over the different categories of services.

They started off with powerful storage and compute services with Simple Storage Service and Elastic Compute Cloud. These spanned across regions quickly and by 2009, S3 and EC2 were launched in Europe, the Elastic Block Store (EBS) was made public, and a powerful content delivery network (CDN), Amazon CloudFront, all became formal parts of AWS offering. These developer-friendly services attracted cloud-ready customers and set the table for formalized partnerships with data-hungry enterprises such as Dropbox, Netflix, and Reddit, all before 2010.

An interesting thing about all these services is that they mirror each other. One of the thing that separates Microsoft Azure from the other vendors is their commitment to and integration with enterprise technology solutions. Microsoft solutions are engrained in the smallest to the biggest of companies. They have leveraged this install base to segway them into their cloud. They developed their cloud products that integrate easily with those existing on-premise solutions and technologies which makes migration a breeze.

This inherently allowed these companies to implement a hybrid cloud strategy. Having a reputation (a well earned one !), for being old, stoggy and slow on the upkeep, Microsoft has ventured into the open source community and it has reflected in Azure as well.

Their compute services are offered by Azure VM’s, very similar to EC2, and abstracted by their PaaS offering, Azure App Services. When it comes to storage you have Azure SQL (Microsoft SQL Server on the cloud !). Azure Tables and DocumentDB are the noSQL databases that Azure offers.

For over 15 years, Google has been building on of the most powerful infrastructure on the planet. The Google cloud platform evolves around this infrastructure. They were late to the party but they opened up the same infrastructure through their cloud platform.

They line up with AWS and Azure for most of their service, but where google shines is in the data scene. They built the underlying technology that Hadoop and mapreduce use. Tools like Big Query allows interactive querying on terabytes of data and you Dataflow for ETL processes. You can even get a fully managed Hadoop, Pig and Hive service using DataProc and that way, spin up a data infrastructure in a couple of minutes. GCP’s host of API’s like prediction, machine learning and translate API’s compliment their expertise in data.

According to Gartner, there are numerous cloud providers in the market apart from the big three, each different and have their own niche. One of the key findings is that the best providers have an extensive array of additional services that extend across the spectrum from IaaS to PaaS. Although it is interesting to note that all the vendors are going to the same stuff. Companies will code their applications into one of the clouds which might steam up the issue of inter-cloud compatibility and migration. The cloud industry is in a state of upheaval, a lot of vendors will exit the market, pivot, or build or acquire a new platform.

Today, the clear market leader in functionality depth and breadth is AWS. This is partly because they have the maturity in the market and the experience to deliver. But competitors like Microsoft and Google aren’t too far behind.

In particular, Microsoft continues to gain headway on AWS. This is especially true because they are a trusted name in enterprise computing with a reliable model for those that already use Microsoft products or languages across the enterprise organization. Google also has a lot to offer in terms of innovation and might be a good fit for those in the open-source, cloud community that focus on smaller projects.

For those pursuing a career in the cloud, one of the best ways is to specialize in one single platform — simply because it’s easier then go into another since all of them are kind of copying each other. One way or the other, there is a good chance you will end up in the cloud.

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