AWS vs Azure vs Google: The battle for cloud supremacy

With every year that passes, it becomes ever more apparent that migrating to the cloud is the only way for companies to truly compete and remain relevant in the long-term.

This was proven during the pandemic, as both freshly launched start-ups and Fortune 500 giants were forced to find solutions that improved flexibility and business resilience to help mitigate the effects of lockdown restrictions. Unsurprisingly, as many as 81% of organizations voiced that COVID had accelerated their cloud timelines and plans.

The statistics show that cloud adoption isn’t slowing down, so instead of wondering if your business should utilize cloud solutions, the question now facing business leaders is: which is the best cloud service provider for their needs?

When assessing cloud providers, CIOs and business owners alike are met with an overwhelming number of providers, features, products, services, hybrid solutions, and training options to consider.

Similarly, IT professionals are looking at which products they should build their skillsets on to gain that competitive advantage in the job market, and rightly so.

According to Gartner’s estimations, the value of the worldwide public cloud service market will balloon to $494.7bn by the end of 2022; that’s a compound annual growth rate of 20.4%.

Choosing a cloud service provider

Any professional worth their salt will tell you that when it comes to identifying the kind of cloud services your business needs to operate at maximum efficiency, you can’t expect a one-size-fits-all solution.

Every organization has its own technological fingerprint; its own distinct set of requirements, goals, and operational nuances that need to be taken into consideration.

With that in mind, it’s worth remembering that the perfect fit for your business could be a hybrid approach; combining different products and services from a mix of leading vendors.

Let’s take a closer look at the top three top names in the industry: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

AWS: Pros and cons

AWS jumped into the game early as the very first major cloud vendor in the space around 16 years ago, claiming an impressive 33% of market share and generating $18.44bn in net sales in Q1 of 2022 alone.

The biggest strength AWS possesses is undoubtedly its maturity and dominance in the public cloud market, with its success and popularity linked to the sheer scale of its operation.

AWS boasts a huge, ever-growing range of products and services, and arguably the most comprehensive network of data centers the market currently has to offer.

Today, it stands tall as the most established vendor, offering perhaps the richest capabilities when it comes to overseeing a massive number of resources and users.

Gartner’s report on cloud IaaS and PaaS vendors shows that AWS remains a clear leader in the market, dominating the cloud landscape and obviously benefiting from its early entrance into the cloud technology sphere.

Microsoft Azure continues to gain ground as the preferred service of existing Microsoft customers, with Google’s offering entering the cloud battleground relatively recently as a ‘leader’.

While other formidable competitors such as Alibaba Cloud and Oracle Cloud have also increased in popularity, AWS remains a strong front runner in the cloud computing industry, with competitors Azure and Google Cloud carving out their own modest share of the market.

Microsoft Azure: Pros and cons

Microsoft showed up on the cloud scene a little later than AWS, but certainly made up for it by adapting its existing on-premises offerings (e.g. Windows Server, Office, SQL Server, SharePoint, Dynamics, etc.) for the cloud.

Over a decade since its initial launch, Azure is a strong competitor to AWS, providing businesses with a great range of features, robust open-source support, and straightforward integration with other Microsoft tools. This makes it particularly well suited for Microsoft-centric organizations.

As a Microsoft product, Azure no doubt benefits from user familiarity with the brand, which creates an immediate preference for Azure among loyal Microsoft customers.

While Azure has an investment focus on making architectural improvements and providing a broad range of enterprise-focused services, in its aforementioned Magic Quadrant report, Gartner noted that “Azure’s novel innovations in the market for IaaS and PaaS relative to its competitors over the past year were substantially less appealing.

Additionally, despite Microsoft Azure’s beginnings as an application PaaS provider, Azure’s product execution and adoption in this segment have been rather mixed.”

Users raised concerns surrounding the resiliency of critical services and the real-world impacts of these services being unavailable. Elsewhere, users also cited issues with commercial complexity and technical support as some primary pain-points when using the provider.

Google Cloud: Pros and cons

As a latecomer to the cloud market, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) naturally offers a more limited range of services and doesn’t command the same global spread of data centers offered by AWS and Azure.

It does, however, give customers a highly specialized service in three main streams: big data, machine learning, and analytics, with good scale and stable load balancing, as well as those famously low response times.

Google’s container offering provides users with a significant advantage as it developed the very Kubernetes standard now utilized by competitors AWS and Azure.

Customers tend to choose GCP as a secondary vendor in a hybrid solution, though it is becoming increasingly popular with organizations that are direct competitors with Amazon, and therefore cannot use AWS.

It’s important to note that GCP is very open-source- and DevOps-centric, and as a result does not integrate as well with Microsoft Azure.

AWS vs Azure vs Google: Pricing

When it comes to choosing a cloud vendor, pricing structures are notoriously complex and somewhat difficult to digest.

This is primarily because there is no single way that providers bill customers; for example, AWS and GCP charge by the second, while Azure bills customers by the minute.

At a glance, this might not seem like much of a difference, however, that quickly changes when calculating the costs of deploying hundreds or thousands of virtual machines.

The fact that many vendors also offer discounts makes matters slightly more complicated—a point to bear in mind when looking at the side-by-side comparison below:

*Prices calculated according to vendors’ current on-demand pricing structure.

AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud: Security

AWS is hailed for its top-quality security, utilizing the services of cybersecurity giant Fortinet for its Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) across the majority of availability zones on an on-demand basis.

Azure also works with Fortinet to provide optimized security services across its data and applications, minimizing security costs when it comes to migration, while GCP uses FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall for advanced security and firewalling.

AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud: The results  

In the battle for cloud supremacy, who comes out of our cloud provider comparison on top? 

• Most established: as the very first major cloud vendor, AWS is undoubtedly the most established cloud provider on the market  
• Best availability: with the greatest number of regions and availability zones worldwide, AWS comes out on top for the best availability 
• Biggest market share: boasting 33% of the market share, AWS remains the most popular cloud provider  
• Fastest growth rate: GCP currently has the fastest growth rate of almost 100% 
• Number of services: when it comes to the sheer number of services and tools available, AWS comes out on top once more 
• Familiarity: as a Microsoft product providing straightforward integration with other Microsoft tools, Azure wins the race when it comes to customer familiarity  
• Most cost-effective price: with the most customer-friendly pricing and discount models, GCP leads the way for the most cost-effective pricing  

So, which cloud provider is right for me?

With Amazon winning our battle for cloud supremacy, is AWS the best cloud provider for your needs?

The truth is that every cloud migration project is as unique as your own fingerprint and depends on your company’s specific needs, goals, industry, and resources.

A 2022 report has in fact shown that 89% of organizations reported having a multi-cloud strategy; 80% opted for a hybrid solution (combining public and private clouds).

When looking for the right cloud vendor for your enterprise, be sure to consider your particular requirements and workload, and remember that the answer could indeed lie in a combination of two or three cloud providers