Cloud computing has started a new era of technology in enterprises for many good reasons from saving costs, time and resources to improving security and performance and reliability of your services.

Multiple cloud service providers offer ready-made professional cloud infrastructure, let’s compare three well known players: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

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Market Share

According to the latest survey of cloud computing market share in earlier 2020 AWS has maintained its top position and captured 32.4% of the whole cloud computing market shares, Azure is 2nd in this race by covering 17.6% of the cloud computing market and Google Cloud attained about 6%.

Amazon Web Services

In the past decade AWS has been the top shareholder of the cloud computing market as a cloud IaaS provider, due to its huge comprehensive network of data centers, it has the capabilities for governing a large number of users and resources. So, it is the most dominant cloud service provider among enterprises with 32% market share.  

• AWS offers Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to their customers that provide secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud.
• EC2 has also a free tier for up to a year which includes 750 hours a month and support both Windows and Linux, making AWS offer unique from other service providers.
• Amazon’s container services provide support for Docker, Kubernetes, and cluster management as well as a virtual private cloud called LightSail.
• For scaling and running web applications, AWS offers Elastic Beanstalk.
• It also offers numerous storage services like Simple Storage Service (S3) for object storage, Elastic Block Storage (EBS) that is used with EC2 and EFS.

Pricing is somehow counted in drawbacks of Amazon when it comes to deal with large chunks of data as the pricing structure of AWS is complex:

Microsoft Azure

Unlike AWS, Microsoft wasn’t a cloud service provider from the start.
Azure was a new launch and Microsoft paid much to become a dominant player in the cloud computing market. Microsoft gave discounts and special offers to its customers that gave them a big jumpstart and attracted many enterprises towards Azure offering.

• Microsoft offers to compute services that are known as Virtual Machines (VMs).
• Like AWS, it also gives support for Linux, Windows Server, SQL, and Oracle with enhanced security alongside a free tier with 750hrs/month for a year.
• Microsoft Azure offers auto-scaling services which are pronounced as Virtual Machine Scale Sets.
• It offers a container service called Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) based on Kubernetes and Docker Hub.
• It also has a special offering called Service Fabric for applications with microservices architecture.
• Azure has another useful feature called Data Lake Store for large data applications and a Blob Storage for unstructured data.

The license price for Microsoft Azure is very close to AWS as shown below:

Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

GCP is specifically designed for cloud-native businesses. It is ideal for Big Data Analytics and machine learning, for scaling and load balancing to increase response time.

• Businesses shift to Google because it is open source and DevOps based.
• Kubernetes standard was introduced by Google and adapted by AWS and Azure as well.
• GCP offers Compute Engine that enhances machine types by giving per second billing and offers Linux and Windows support with automatic discounts.
• Google has a carbon-neutral infrastructure that consumes 50% less energy than the other data centers.
• Like the other two competitors, it offers a free f1-micro instance/month for a year.

Google offers fewer storage services than the other two service providers that’s why it is on third in this race. But its open-source software library for building machine learning operations is it’s a key feature.

Which one to choose?

Large enterprises are naturally attracted to AWS as it has numerous tools and services that would not fit the needs of a small business.

If you have more than 50% of your infrastructure based on Microsoft’s software or your business type is banking, finance company, NBFC, or BFSI, then it is a wise decision to go with Azure.

Google Cloud Platform is for those who are looking to choose an option other than Azure and AWS.