In this era where most of the modern PC and mobile applications run on the cloud, the competition between the various cloud computing platforms is getting more intense. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are the most popular cloud service providers at the moment. All these three have invested lots of resources in their cloud computing platforms to make them more robust and reliable.
But which one of these three cloud infrastructures does a better job? This question is what we are going to address in this article. We will compare Amazon Web Services(AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud basing on the following aspects: market share, services offered, availability zones, and pricing. Let’s dive in.
Market share
As far as market share is concerned, AWS is still very dominant with a share of about 33%. Coming early into the cloud space is one of the reasons why AWS is very popular. Amazon started their AWS division in 2006, which means they were way ahead of Google and Microsoft in terms of research by the time these came into the public cloud market. In second place is Microsoft with a share of about 20%, and Google cloud sits in the third position with about 9% of the market share.
Availability zones
AWS has been in the cloud domain the longest, so they have had more time to build and expand their network in several countries around the world. For those who may not know, availability zones refer to locations within the data center regions where cloud services originate.
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Amazon Web Services currently has over 77 availability zones in over 24 geographical regions across the globe. They have also announced their plans to add more 18 availability zones and 6 more regions. The new regions to be added to their list include; India, Australia, Indonesia, Switzerland, Spain, and Japan
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Microsoft Azure has 54 regions globally that are available in over 140 countries.
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Google Cloud is currently available in about 24 regions with plans of adding more soon.
These availability zones are isolated so that a failure at one doesn’t affect the operations of a data center in another zone. A cloud computing platform that has more availability zones is more reliable than those with lesser zones. In this regard, AWS beats both Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
Services offered by each platform
Amazon Web Service beats Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure when it comes to the number of services offered. AWS currently has 200+ services, whereas Azure and Google Cloud offer 100+ and 60+ services respectively.
Some of the popular services offered at AWS include; Amazon Elastic compute cloud, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Container Service, Amazon Relational Database Service, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Simple Storage Service, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), and Elastic Load Balancer.
The popular services offered by Microsoft Azure include the following; Virtual Machines, App Services, and cloud services, Azure Functions, Azure Cosmos DB, SQL Database, Azure Archive Blob Storage, Blob storage, Virtual Networks (VNets), Azure DNS, Express Router, and many more.
Google cloud services include the following; Google Cloud Functions, Google computer engine, Google app engine, Google Cloud SQL, Google Cloud Bigtable, Google Cloud Datastore, Google Cloud Storage, Google cloud Nearline, Virtual Private Cloud, Google cloud load balancing, Google Cloud DNS, and many more.
Pricing
Another key factor that anyone wanting to use these cloud services has to consider is the pricing. The table below shows the pricing details for each of these services.
| Instance size | Microsoft Azure(from $70 per month) | Google Cloud (From $52 per month) | AWS(From $69 per month) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Smaller instances | For an instance with 8gB RAM, and 2VCPUs, the average charge for Azure is about $70 per month. | For the same instance i.e. 2 vCPUs and 8GB RAM, Google Cloud charges $52 per month, which is the cheapest amongst all three. | For the same instance features (2 vCPUs and 8GB RAM), AWS charges $69 per month, which is just $1 more less what Azure charges. |
| Larger instances | When we consider the largest instance offered by Azure i.e., 128vCPUs and 3.89TB RAM, Microsoft Azure charges $6.79 per hour. | The largest instance by Google cloud has 160 vCPUs and 3.75TB of RAM. For this instance, Google charges around $5.32 per hour. | AWS’s larger instance comes with 3.85TB RAM and 128 vCPUs. This kind of instance will cost you $3.97 per hour. |
Based on the table above, Google cloud offers the best deal for small instance users. On the other hand, AWS is the cheapest when it comes to the largest instances that each of these has to offer. When it comes to computing power, Google Cloud has more virtual CPUs if we consider the largest instance each of these three has to offer. This feature could be a big factor for cloud users who need this kind of computing.
Popular brands that use each of these cloud services
Amazon Web Services is used by more popular brands than Azure and Google Cloud. Some of the popular companies that use Amazon web services include; Netflix, Samsung, Twitch, Baidu, ESPN, Xiaomi, BMW, Airbnb, and many more.
Brands that use Microsoft Azure include; Wikipedia, MSI computer, LG Electronics, Verizon, Hp, AT&T, Fijifilms, and many more. Those that use Google cloud include; Snapchat, HTC, BestBuy, Coca-Cola, Spotify, Philips, etc. It should also be noted that some of these companies use services from more than one cloud computing platform. Some actually use all three platforms.
Final Thoughts
All these platforms have been in the cloud computing space for at least a decade, with AWS being the oldest. AWS was in the cloud space for over four years before Azure and Google cloud came into the picture. Amazon also offers way more services than all three. So, for anyone looking for a cloud platform that offers almost every cloud service you can think of, AWS is the ideal choice.
When it comes to reliability and security, all these platforms are pretty much at par, with AWS slightly ahead since they have more availability zones in more regions across the globe. All in all, AWS is the all-around cloud computing platform that we can easily recommend to anyone looking for reliable cloud computing services.
contact Agilecube if you are evaluating best infrastucture choice for your application modernization.
