AWS vs. Azure vs. Google Cloud: What To Choose For An Enterprise Cloud Platform?
Adapting to cloud computing has become the driving force for businesses in today’s world. Applications are moved from on-premises data centers to cloud servers to follow the innovative trends and cut costs while increasing agility for business processes.
Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is a model where third-party providers host and maintain the core infrastructure of a business, including hardware, software, servers, and storage on behalf of the customer. IaaS generally includes hosting applications in a highly scalable environment that allows customers to increase work efficiency and is only charged for the specific infrastructures in use.
In cloud storage and computing, the BIG THREE public cloud vendors are Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. These platforms support only the most heavily regulated businesses that continue to tread carefully when it comes to the incorporation of cloud services.
But which one is the best cloud service provider and why?
Let’s look into all the aspects that make each of them unique and how they differ.
Key Strengths
Although AWS has consistently dominated the cloud service provider market for years, each of the platforms has its unique strengths to offer.
Selecting any one vendor over the others will always come to your business needs and requirements and the workload you need to run.
In many cases, organizations use multiple providers for different business aspects or other use cases. This type of cloud operation is known as the multiple-cloud approach.
Although they are all compelling, there are key differences that separate the approach of the three cloud service providers and can help end-users consider which is right for them.
AWS
The key strength of the market leader is the consistently vast breadth and depth of their services.
AWS often wins on developer functionalities due to the vast service functionalities that result in several first-mover advantages. AWS also has managed to translate its scale into economic benefits for customers successfully, but there are times when the cloud can be cost-prohibitive. You can hire AWS developers to boost up your business with our robust and powerful AWS Cloud Development Services.
Azure
On the other hand, Microsoft tends to be a trendy choice with the C-level executives that have an old and existing relationship with the vendors and know that they can help consume the majority of the enterprise computing requirements in one place. From productivity and enterprise software to flexible cloud computing resources for developers in a single data transaction.
Naturally, all three cloud services vendors are strong in machine learning, but with deep wells of internal research and development experts, Google takes the upper hand and stands out to its customers every time. Google offers machine learning that has grown to an unprecedented scale over the last two decades.
Google also stands out for its extensive expertise that revolves around open-source technologies that include the development of Kubernetes for orchestration and the Istio service mesh that has rapidly grown to be an industry-standard technology.
Features and Services
At their core, all three technologies offer almost similar necessary capabilities that revolve around flexible compute, storage, and networking. They all share the common element of a public cloud that provides self-service and instant provisioning, autoscaling, extensive security, and identity management.
Additionally, all three cloud services vendors have developed their technologies and tools with cutting edge technologies like the Internet of Things and serverless computing. At the same time, clients can tap into any of the three cloud service providers and develop mobile applications or high-performance computing environments, depending on the company requirements.
AWS
AWS launched Sage Maker in 2017 as a simplified adaptation of machine learning by combining hosted network environments for Jupiter notebook with built-in model management and spin-up of training environments using EC2 and HTTP endpoints for hosting functionalities with Amazon S3.
Azure
Azure’s Machine Learning allows developers to write, test, and launch algorithms and access a marketplace for off-shelf APIs.
Google Cloud
Google offers a one-stop-shop AI platform that helps machine learning developers build and launch models based on all popular open-source Tensor deep learning libraries.
For UK customers, AWS launched its UK region in 2016, with Microsoft and Google following suit to provide better data sovereignty.
Hybrid Option
One of the growing trends among companies and hyper-scale public cloud service providers in the ever-increasing focus on helping the customers get a hybrid and multi-cloud system.
A hybris-cloud system provides their customers the access to deploy their business processes across multiple cloud service providers and maintain some application data on-site. Vendors have responded with several solutions to help their customers get into hybrid-cloud services as most of them are not ready to jump all-in on the public clouds just yet.
Microsoft has long been the go-to option for hybris -cloud development among the three giants with an extensively established Azure stack. It has provided clients with hardware and software requirements to deploy Azure cloud services for local data centres with shared management portals, code, and API support for easy compatibility.
Verdict
AWS continues to lead the cloud service market to offer the broadest range of functionalities in simple terms. It is consistent in being the market leader, but the gap is closing slowly.
With the extensive range of tools and services, besides being very enterprise-friendly and having a strong proposition for large companies and businesses. Meanwhile, it has a consistently growing infrastructure that provides economics of a vast scale providing aggressive price cuts.
With time, Microsoft has begun to bridge the gap between AWS and itself by constant investment in creating a more extensive infrastructure for the Azure cloud platform and plan to strengthen ties with its existing premises.
Microsoft will continue to provide a strong proposition for all businesses heavily invested in Microsoft for technologies and developer support.
For Google, it has the potential to be a more severe enterprise competition under new leadership. It is already making progress with its existing customers, especially with Kubernetes and machine learning experts. Still, a lot of work is left for Google Cloud to prove itself a viable enterprise option.
