Cloud computing has revolutionized how organizations access computing resources, store data, and deploy applications. Rather than maintaining their own data centers, companies can leverage the global infrastructure of cloud platforms to achieve greater agility, scale, and cost efficiency.
The top three cloud providers – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) – hold over 65% of the public cloud market share. This article provides an in-depth comparison of their capabilities across key categories to help you determine which is the best fit for your needs.
Understanding the Basics of Cloud Computing
Before diving into the specifics of each platform, let‘s briefly recap what cloud computing entails. Cloud computing provides on-demand access to computing power, databases, storage, and a broad set of services over the internet.
Rather than owning the physical infrastructure, you rent access from a cloud provider. This allows companies to quickly scale capacity up and down based on real-time demands, removing the need for costly overprovisioning. You only pay for the resources you use.
Common cloud services include:
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – Provides building blocks for cloud IT like virtual machines, servers, networking, and storage
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) – Managed environment for developing, testing and deploying applications
- Software as a Service (SaaS) – Ready-to-use cloud-based applications
Now let‘s explore the leading platforms in more detail.
AWS Overview
Amazon Web Services pioneered public cloud infrastructure when it first launched in 2006. Today, it holds over 30% market share and reported $62 billion in revenue in 2021.
Some key facts about AWS:
- Over 200 fully-featured services from data centers globally
- Comprehensive IaaS offerings including virtual machines, servers, storage, and databases
- Broad set of PaaS and SaaS services for IoT, mobile, AI, media hosting, DevOps, security, and more
- Extensive partner network and marketplace for third-party software integrations
- Pay-as-you-go pricing with no upfront costs or long-term contracts
AWS powers many enterprise applications with significant security, governance, and compliance requirements including companies like Goldman Sachs, Unilever, and Airbnb.
Microsoft Azure Overview
First launched in 2010, Microsoft Azure has established itself as the second largest public cloud provider with over 23% market share. Backed by Microsoft‘s long history serving enterprise customers, Azure emphasizes hybrid cloud deployments seamlessly integrating with existing on-premises Microsoft infrastructure.
Key Azure capabilities:
- Over 200 cloud services for compute, databases, analytics, Kubernetes, and more
- Global scale currently spanning over 60 regions with compliance offerings that meet international standards
- Strong hybrid cloud options to bridge between on-prem and cloud environments
- Tight integration with Microsoft developer tools and services
- Usage-based pricing or reserved instances discounts
Azure powers complex enterprise applications for companies like Adobe, General Electric, and London Heathrow Airport leveraging its hybrid cloud strength.
Google Cloud Platform Overview
With expertise serving Google searches, Gmail, and YouTube to billions of users, Google entered the cloud market in 2008. It has quickly grown to become the third largest public cloud provider with a 10% market share.
Google Cloud capabilities include:
- Services for compute, storage, networking, big data, machine learning, and application development
- Global network powered by Google‘s private fiber optic backbone with availability across 200+ countries
- Specialization around open source, Linux, containers, Kubernetes, and big data analytics
- Integrated offerings leveraging other Google technologies like Maps, Search, and Chrome
- Commitment to sustainability with aim to run on carbon-free energy by 2030
Top Google Cloud customers include Snap, Best Buy, and PayPal running innovative applications in gaming, ecommerce, and digital payments.
Comparing Cloud Infrastructure and Availability
When it comes to global infrastructure to deliver cloud-based resources, AWS leads in scale and maturity having launched over 15 years ago. Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud are rapidly expanding as demand for public cloud services continues growing exponentially.
Here‘s a breakdown of the cloud data centers and regions for each provider:
- AWS – 84 Availability Zones within 26 geographic Regions around the world with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones across 5 more AWS Regions.
- Microsoft Azure – Over 60 regions globally across North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa. Azure has Availability Zones in select regions for high availability within a region.
- Google Cloud – 35 zones within 17 regions around the world. Google has announced plans to expand to 10 more regions and many additional zones.
AWS clearly has the most mature and largest infrastructure currently. But Microsoft and Google are rapidly adding data centers to increase capacity and regional coverage, especially in emerging markets.
Comparing Key Cloud Services
The top three cloud platforms offer an extensive array of cloud computing services spanning infrastructure, storage, networking, databases, analytics, machine learning, application development, Internet of Things (IoT), and more.
While the list of services numbers over 100 for each provider, below is a comparison across some of the most foundational capabilities.
Compute Services
For virtual machines, containers, functions, batch processing and running applications in the cloud:
- AWS – Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, AWS Fargate, AWS Batch, AWS Elastic Beanstalk
- Azure – Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Container Instances, Azure Functions, Azure Batch, Azure App Service
- Google Cloud – Compute Engine, Cloud Functions, Cloud Run, App Engine, Kubernetes Engine
Storage Services
For object, block or file storage as well as cold storage options:
- AWS – Amazon S3, Amazon EBS, Amazon EFS, Amazon Glacier
- Azure – Blob storage, Disk Storage, Azure Files, Archive storage
- Google Cloud – Cloud Storage, Persistent Disk, Filestore, Archive Storage
Database Services
For relational, non-relational, in-memory, search and other database engines:
- AWS – Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon DocumentDB, Amazon Neptune
- Azure – Azure SQL Database, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Database for MySQL, SQL Server on VMs, Azure Cache for Redis
- Google Cloud – Cloud SQL, Cloud Spanner, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Memorystore, Firebase Database
This table just scratches the surface when it comes to all the cloud native services available. But it gives a glimpse into the competitive feature set across fundamental compute, storage and database capabilities.
Analytics, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
In addition to core infrastructure and platforms, the cloud enables organizations to leverage advanced technologies like big data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
- AWS – Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Forecast, Amazon Lex
- Azure – Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure HDInsight, Azure Machine Learning, Azure Cognitive Services
- Google Cloud – BigQuery, Dataproc, AI Platform/Vertex AI, Cloud Natural Language API
While all three provide services across analytics, AI/ML, Google Cloud differentiates itself with industry-leading analytics prowess honed from Search and Ads that run Google‘s business. AWS and Azure counter with strong generalized ML platform capabilities like SageMaker and Azure ML.
Hybrid Cloud and Migration Capabilities
As enterprise IT landscapes evolve to span both on-premises private data centers and public cloud environments, the ability to operate seamlessly across them is critically important.
- AWS – AWS Outposts, AWS Migration Hub, AWS Database Migration Service (DMS)
- Azure – Azure Stack, Azure Migrate, Azure Site Recovery
- Google Cloud – Anthos for hybrid deployments, Google Migrate API
Microsoft Azure has made the most advances around hybrid capabilities given its incumbent position powering traditional Microsoft workloads within private data centers.
Google Cloud‘s Anthos platform also shows promise to modernize hybrid infrastructure leveraging containers and Kubernetes as the common layer.
Security, Compliance and Trust
For highly regulated industries like healthcare, financial services and government, compliance with security and data sovereignty laws is mandatory. All cloud providers invest heavily in controls, audits and international compliance certifications.
While AWS and Microsoft Azure have a more extensive certification portfolio spanning more geographies and verticals, Google Cloud is quickly ramping up its coverage to compete.
Some examples of major compliance standards supported:
- HIPAA for healthcare data
- PCI DSS for payment card information
- SOC reports for financial controls
- FedRAMP, FIPS and other authority mandates for government
Google also aims to differentiate with its concept of "Confidential Computing" leveraging new hardware capabilities to encrypt data while in use. Nevertheless, all three platforms meet rigorous security and data protection standards needed for any major enterprise.
Cost Management and Pricing
Public cloud displaced traditional data centers largely based on agility and cost – only paying for actual usage rather than overprovisioned capacity sitting idle.
Cloud pricing models continue emphasizing flexibility and cost control:
- Pay-as-you-go based on actual usage
- Flexible term commitments for discounts like 1 to 3 years
- Spot and preemptible instances options for unused capacity
- Reserved capacity discounts for steady-state workloads
All three hyperscale providers can provide significant cost savings over traditional data centers. Given the wide variability in use cases and special pricing programs, doing a thorough TCO analysis is recommended rather than generalizing which option is most economical.
Choosing the Right Cloud Platform
With an overview across key selection criteria, how do you determine the right platform for your cloud adoption? Here are some best practices that hold true regardless of whether you choose AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud:
- Assess business requirements and map apps/services against cloud offerings
- Factor in both technical and organizational change management
- Prototype solutions leveraging free trials to validate capabilities
- Evaluate economics for production-level resource needs
- Consider hybrid deployment options if necessary
- Start small, learn and iterate as you migrate
And most importantly, the major cloud platforms make it easy to avoid vendor lock-in should your preferences evolve over time. By architecting solutions the right way, you can migrate workloads across cloud providers based on your changing requirements.
While the hyperscale cloud landscape continues to consolidate around AWS, Microsoft and Google, having strong alternatives benefits enterprises. Customer choice and flexibility – not lock-in – serve users best in the long run.
So explore which platform aligns best to your individual needs, but know that you have options to adjust course as your organization grows.
