AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud: A Detailed Comparison!

The explosion of the cloud is no more a thing of the future, it is happening now and here. Companies are seeking these services without thinking twice about the cost factor. Yes, they do thorough scrutiny to choose the best public cloud services, but then at the end of the day, they have to choose one. More often than not, the choice is really among the three biggest public cloud services providers – Amazon Web Service, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

AWS, which is the senior counterpart of the other forms of cloud services has a 33% market share. It is closely followed by Azure and then comes the Google cloud platform. Various factors determine the use cases of these services. Let’s have a quick look at each of them.

A Quick Look at the Three Cloud Services Provider

Amazon Web Services

Launched way back in 2006, AWS or Amazon Web Services is a subsidiary of Amzon.com and the first cloud computing service provider. Perhaps, it is a combination of tools and the head start it has that has huge user bases is justified.

Amazon was the first company to take a punt with pay as you go model of cloud business. Their singular focus was on public cloud services. This was reflected in the line of offering they provided to their clientele.   

The list of services that provides the companies to scale their digital assets with minimum costs includes – EC2 server-based services, Relational Database. VPC or Virtual Private Cloud, Load Balancer, and Route 53 domain name system service.

Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure came into the scene nearly four years after AWS was launched. The biggest USP of Azure in terms of usage is that it is used by 80% of the Fortune 500 companies, it has grown considerably over the years.

One other thing that has made Azure an instant hit is the fact that it supports multitudes of programming languages, like C#, Java, and many more. Speaking of services, Azure has eighteen categories of cloud services with a total count of offerings accumulating to 200.

Google Cloud Platform

Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could use your company’s web offering on a similar infrastructure that Google uses? You can do that with GCP or Google Cloud Platform. Launched in 2012, GCP has been increasingly used by companies to leverage computing and networking services to bolster the growth.

Initially, Google used GCP infrastructure to operate its Google search engine and Youtube offers. So, the potential of the platform in terms of scalability is hard to imagine. Yet, for some of its intrinsic drawbacks, it has a lot more to do, to be on the same lines with giants like Amazon, and Microsoft.

The services provided by GCP can be categorized into three domains – compute, storage, and networking. These domain branches are distributed through various nodal services that complete the GCP.

Point of comparisons

 

Now, let’s compare the web services based on core factors, like Availability Zone. Compute, Storage, Database, Networking & Content Delivery. So, let’s dive straight into it.

Compute

Computing services are provided by leading cloud service providers. Assessing the cloud solutions on this parameter will provide an insight into the scaling opportunity provided forth for companies handling various operations over the web.

Services	GCP	Azure	AWS
Container	Google Kubernetes Engine	Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)	Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Container Service
Container register	Container registry	Container registry	EC2 registry
PaaS	Google App Engine	App Service and Cloud Services	AWS Elastic Beanstalk
VPCs	Not present	Virtual Machine Image	Lightsail
Working with servers	Compute Engine	VM & VM scale sets	EC2
System Integration Properties	Cloud Beta Functions	Event Grid & Web Jobs	Lambda

Database

Sophistication of database workload management comes to the fore when we look into the database domain services of each of the cloud solutions.

Database Service	GCP	Azure	AWS
RDBMS	Google Cloud SQL	SQL Database	Amazon Relational Database Service
Indexed NoSQL	Datastore, Big table	Cosmos DB	DynamoDB
Block storage	Persistent disks	Page Blobs	EBS
Object Storage	Cloud storage block	Blobs and files	S3
Caching	CloudCDN	RedisCache	ElastiCache

Storage

The excellence factor of cloud solutions majorly depends on the data storage and manipulation capabilities. Let us see the storage offerings provided by the three leading cloud service providers.

Storage Services	GCP	Azure	AWS
File Storage	ZFS/Avere	Azure File Storage	Amazon Elastic File System
Object Storage	Google Cloud Storage	Blob Storage	Amazon Simple Storage Service
Cold Storage	Google Cloud Storage Nearline	Azure Archive Blob Storage	Amazon Glacier
Virtual Server Disks	Google Compute Engine Persistent Disks	Managed Disks	Amazon Elastic Block Store

Networking Services

Due to the service, domain architecture GCP edges past Az4re. However, AWS dominates here as well. The table below shows the networking solution provided by each of the three giants.

Storage Services	GCP	Azure	AWS
Peering	Google cloud interconnect	ExpressRoute	Direct Connect
DNS	Google Cloud DNS	Azure DNS	Amazon Route 53
Elastic load balancer	Cloud load balancing	Load balancer	Elastic load balancer
Virtual Network	Virtual Private Cloud	Virtual Networks (VNets)	Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

Conclusion

Comparing each form of cloud service solutions to the minutest details can seem to be an exciting prospect. However, there is no point beyond a certain stage. These service providers are doing everything they can in terms of rolling out new features and services to attain the numero uno position. For instance, Microsoft is playing with the idea of underwater data centers with Project Natick.

It all boils down to your usage requirement budget to rank your choice of preference. If you want to avail the benefit of hybrid cloud and tech innovations for Microsoft solutions, then Azure should be your pick. Now, if you want to leverage the power of ML and AI tools in cloud computing, GCP should be your choice. On the other hand, if you want to be as big as Netflix or Amazon itself, then you choose AWS.