AWS vs Azure vs GCP — The Selection Dilemma

The war for cloud supremacy is between the Three Giants. While other players like IBM and Oracle have ventured into cloud services, they are still a long way off from cornering a significant share of the market. Each of the three cloud platforms AWS, Azure, and GCP are unique in their own way and offer a plethora of options for organizations to select from based on their specific requirements.

For any IT professional, an enigmatic situation arises where they have to choose a cloud platform to use for their work. Now, this is the greatest dilemma in choosing the platform best fit for their problem. All of us know that the three giants (AWS, Azure, GCP)are doing best in their segment and offer a lot of services for their customers then how do we choose. Now, choosing the platform totally depends on your problem statement and requirement. Let’s find out the best cloud platform for your application.

We will first discuss the three big platforms one by one and then the parameters on the basis of which you should pick the platform.

Amazon Web Service (AWS)

Established in 2006, AWS escalated its services and offerings and is a tycoon in cloud computing now taking 32% of the cloud market share. AWS offers a range of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings that can be classified into computing, database, content delivery and storage, and networking.

AWS enables a smooth and flexible data collection flow using serverless services such as Amazon Kinesis Streams, Amazon SQS Queues, and AWS Lambda Functions. It provides its customers a variety of options to choose operating systems, databases, storage, programming language, etc.

AWS also offers management tools to track resource usage such as AWS cloud trail, AWS CloudWatch, etc which helps in optimizing the usage and lucrative for the organization.

Amazon is having the largest data center among all three pioneers with 77 regions with an increasing number of availability zones which provides great availability to its customers making AWS a clear winner in this domain.

Azure

Azure was first established in 2008 is growing rapidly with a wide variety of services and offerings on its platform acquiring 19% of the cloud market share. They provide a seamless integration with Microsoft products which gives them an upper hand. Since Microsoft products are already having a huge network of customers, they prefer Azure as the best fit for their work as Azure provides seamless integration and migration with Microsoft products. As a cloud service provider, Azure provides a range of offerings and services to its customers including compute, storage, networking, and monitoring.

Azure Site Recovery enables organizations of all sizes to orchestrate site-to-site replication and data recovery to VMs hosted on Azure itself. Azure offers Zone Redundant Storage (ZRS) or data storage redundancy across multiple data center regions. Azure ExpressRoute facilitates connectivity of the data center to Azure through a private link without using the Internet, thereby providing higher security, greater reliability, and lower latency.

Azure also has extensive networking capabilities including support for multiple site-to-site connections to virtual networks, along with the ability to connect virtual networks across different regions to each other.

Azure has the lowest on-demand and discounted instance pricing. Specialist developers can write, test and deploy algorithms using the Azure Machine Learning Studio. Nowadays, Azure DevOps and Azure ML are getting famous and better day by day luring more customers.

GCP

With an interactive interface, reliable network, affordable prices, and flexible compute and storage options, GCP is another alternative to AWS and Azure acquiring 7% of the cloud market share. It provides a large number of data centers providing a high level of availability. The marketplace offers a variety of applications that are useful for customers.

Google offers huge discounts on their compute instances, storage, and backup. With a large number of data centers, they have a reliable network and provide backup of your instance anytime.

Google offers several off-the-shelf APIs pertaining to computer vision, natural language processing, and translation. Machine learning engineers can build models based on Google’s Cloud Machine Learning Engine’s open-source TensorFlow deep learning library.

Another parameter that attracts a lot of customers to GCP is pricing and offers. For first-time users, it provides $300 to their customers to get their hands dirty and understand the services. Post that the pricing is pretty affordable making GCP a good option for any cloud-related work.

Comparison between all three on different parameters

The above comparison illuminates various services of all three cloud providers.

As per my concern, pricing and discounts are the ones which allure more customers as compute, backup, storage, networking is pretty much similar for all three providers. Considering discounts and offerings, AWS takes and advantage of their cheap and affordable prices followed by GCP followed by Azure in the market. However, choosing the platform will totally depend on the requirement of the customers. All the three provides are best in their class.

Furthermore, if you want to learn more about their offering and discounts, please signup today for the free tier account and explore their discounts sections.