AWS vs Azure vs Google: Which Is the Best Cloud Platform For Your Business?

How to Choose the Perfect Cloud Platform for Your Startup?

Selecting a cloud platform isn’t the easiest thing, especially if you haven’t used any of them before. That’s why you should check best practices and ask for recommendations from other business owners or developers who have experience with cloud-based app development. 

Also, before you go to select a cloud service provider, you must know which type of cloud platform you require. There are three types of cloud services and they are:

• Software as a Service
• Platform as a Service
• Infrastructure as a Service

You must have seen these abbreviations a number of times when looking for cloud service providers. But, before going into details, let’s check out the definition of each one of them.

SaaS: Software as a Service is described as the software provided over the internet as a service and typically on a membership basis. SaaS solutions are the best alternatives that are acceptable when your business is time-sensitive and isn’t prepared to develop your own infrastructure to create and deploy the applications.

Utilizing a SaaS solution is a very smart idea if you are working on a short-term project or in a temporary collaboration. It is perfect for end-users.

PaaS: Platform as a Service (PaaS) is described as a service that provides you a ready software environment for developing and deploying applications.

Such services also give you the required tools for the exact configuration of the development environment: operating systems, hardware, middleware, databases and tools for testing and coding.

There are a lot of advantages of using PaaS – you have to write less code for your project, it provides you flexibility and a number of tools that make development much convenient and simpler. That is the reason PaaS is often viewed as one of the essential components for building eCommerce apps. 

However, with PaaS. you’ll still need developers who can work for you on database arrangement, frontend, and business logic. PaaS is ideal for software developers. But, if you don’t have resources, you can go with SaaS.

IaaS: Infrastructure as a Service provides online access to resources like networking systems, data storage and cloud servers for deploying projects and operating systems. This is acknowledged through virtualization, without developing and maintaining your own infrastructure. 

In other words, it is just like leasing a physical server, just on the internet. With IaaS, you get the highest level of personalization, full control of infrastructure, and, obviously, scalability. It is ideal for IT administrations.

Now that you know what SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS mean and which cloud service you require for your business, let’s see which cloud service provider is best to avail these services.

Amazon Web Services - Features, Pricing, Pros and Cons

Amazon Web Services, popularly known as AWS, is a cloud computing platform by Amazon. The service provides its users with a mix of IaaS and Paas services. In addition, it offers SaaS services also as packaged software. Let’s analyze AWS depending on the features it provides and pricing.

1. AWS Features

AWS offers almost every feature that comes under cloud computing. Their cloud services enable you to get simple access to data storage, computing power, and other functionality essential for application developers.

AWS has numerous products that fall under numerous classes. They offer developer tools, mobile services, management tools and app services. The application services combined with the computing and database infrastructure are basic necessities for a successful enterprise app development team. Here are some of the stunning features that AWS provides:

Mobile-Friendly Access: AWS Mobile Hub supports and helps you in deciding the appropriate and compatible feature for your application.

It incorporates a console that helps you access AWS services that incorporate development, testing, and maintenance of the mobile application. It incorporates clear approaches to choose and configure mobile application features like content delivery and push-notification.

Utilizing AWS Mobile SDK, your application can directly get to Amazon Web Services, for example, S3, DynamoDB, and Lambda. The Mobile SDK supports Android, iOS, Web, React Native, and many more.

Serverless Cloud Functions: Amazon API and Amazon Gateway help developers by executing their code and scaling it. AWS Serverless Cloud Functions help the client so that they can focus just on building the application. Server management is done by AWS alongside it, it performs scaling, patching and also the management of the infrastructure.

Databases: Amazon gives access to databases as per requirements and the database given by them is managed by them completely. Some of the databases and their uses are described below: 

• For transactional purposes, relational databases can be used.
• Non-Relational Database is used for internet-scale applications.
• Data Warehouse for Analytics.
• In-memory data stores are used for caching & real-time workloads.
• Graph databases are used for applications with highly connected data.

Storage: Storage is one of the flexible, economical and easy to use features provided by Amazon. The storage function provided by AWS can be utilized freely as well as in combination to meet your prerequisite. Below mentioned are the storage functions provided by AWS:

• Amazon glacier which is used for long-term storage.
• Amazon’s basic storage service provides scalable object storage for analytics and data backup.
• The Amazon EBS provides block storage options that can be used for persistent data storage with EC-2 instances.

As a number of companies rely on AWS, Amazon provides maximum security to ensure data safety. The features AWS provides let customers innovate and scale. 

2. Pricing

Amazon’s pricing is very mysterious. While it has a cost calculator on its website, the many factors involved in calculating the fee make it hard to get exact estimates. As per Gartner, Amazon’s pricing structure is complex and the use of third-party cost management tools is recommended.

3. Pros and Cons of AWS

AWS offers the most vigorous services and features, global footprints and partner ecosystem. It ranks in the top position when it comes to security, monitoring, reliability, platform configuration options, and policy features. AWS is continually adding new services and upgrading existing ones with new abilities. Here are some of its advantages: 

• It is the most mature cloud service provider
• It is a wide collection of services and partner ecosystem 
• It is prescribed for all use cases that run well in a virtualized domain 

But, if a hybrid cloud strategy is imperative to your business, AWS may miss the mark when compared with Azure. Another caution with AWS is its scale. Smaller organizations may find it hard to explore the extensive portfolio of services, and some see AWS similar to a complex cloud service provider to manage. Here are some of its disadvantages:

• It requires advanced expertise to manage
• It somewhere lacks strong hybrid cloud support
• Its wide range of services can be overwhelming to navigate. 

Now that we have seen what AWS has to offer, its pros as well as cons. It’s now time to check other cloud service providers. So, let’s check what Microsoft Azure has to offer.

Microsoft Azure - Features, Pricing, Pros and Cons

Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform and infrastructure intended to develop, deploy and manage various applications and services through a giant network of data centers managed by Microsoft. It was released on February 1st, 2010 with the name Windows Azure. Later on, it was renamed to Microsoft Azure on 25th March 2014. Let’s see AWS depending on the features it provides.

1. Microsoft Azure Features

Like AWS cloud services, Azure offers a full assortment of services for application development needs. The platform enables you to deploy and manage virtual machines. In Azure, you can do your work and computation at whatever capacity you require under just a minute.

Additionally, if your custom software needs to run large-scale computing, it can deal with it as well. This is really a remarkable feature of Azure and AWS over the Google Cloud Platform. All Azure features integrate into your current existing frameworks and procedures, offering more power and capacity for enterprise development. Every one of the important elements that is used to develop a virtual network and deliver applications or services to a worldwide audience are accessible with Azure, including: 

Virtual Machines (VMs): These cloud-based Virtual Machines will host your applications and services as if they resided in your own data center.

SQL databases: Azure provides managed SQL relational databases, as a service. This spares you overhead and costs on hardware, programming, and the requirement for in-house expertise. 

Azure Active Directory Domain Services: Developed on the same proven technology as Windows Active Directory, this administration for Azure lets you remotely oversee group policy, validation, and everything else. This makes existing and moving security structures partially or absolutely to the cloud as simple as a couple of clicks.

Storage: You can without a doubt count on Microsoft’s global infrastructure to give safe, profoundly accessible data storage. With massive versatility and an intelligent pricing structure that lets you store inconsistently accessed information at an enormous savings, building a safe and financially savvy storage plan is easy in Microsoft Azure. 

Developers can track code changes, share it with each other, perform load testing, and deliver apps to production while working with Azure from everywhere around the world. Same as AWS, Azure provides its users a blend of IaaS, SaaS and PaaS services.

2. Pricing

Microsoft Azure doesn’t make things any simpler when it comes to pricing. Because of Microsoft’s complex software licensing alternatives and utilization of situation based discounts, its pricing structure can be hard to understand without outside assistance as well as extensive experience. 

3. Pros and Cons of Microsoft Azure

Presently, if you are having a microsoft-centric environment in your organization, Azure can be the best fit for you. It integrates flawlessly with key on-premises frameworks like windows server, system center, and active directory. Microsoft is also good in its PaaS and hybrid cloud abilities. Here are a couple of Azure’s advantages:

• Consistent integration with other Microsoft services and products
• Improved help for Linux and open-source application stacks
• Perfect for hybrid cloud
• Prescribed for all use cases that run well in a virtualized environment

One disadvantage of Azure is the level of technical skill needed to maintain and configure it in a proficient, dependable and safe way. The configurations of Azure are known for being troublesome and frustrating to execute. Here are some disadvantages of Azure: 

• The poor scale of large scale implementation
• Advanced technical expertise is needed to implement Azure in a secure and reliable way
• Historical issues with reliability

Azure has also confronted a series of blackouts throughout the years, causing dependability issues for virtual systems. However, Microsoft is continually putting resources into lessening troublesome maintenance and improving its quality. 

Let’s see what Google’s Cloud Platform has to offer now.

Google Cloud Platform - Features, Pricing, Pros and Cons

Google’s cloud platform gives a solid and exceptionally scalable framework for developers to develop, test and deploy applications. It covers application, storage and computing services for backend, portable and web solutions. More than four million apps trust and utilize the platform at present. Let’s explore its features, pricing, pros, and cons.

1. GCP Features

Compute Engine: This is Google’s IaaS – infrastructure-as-a-service. Through this, Google’s infrastructure can be utilized to run workloads on an enormous scale on virtual machines. You can choose a virtual machine to meet your requirements and enjoy the consistency and performance of Google’s system around the world. 

App Engine: Increase profitability by utilizing in-built administrations to develop your applications. You simply need to download the SDK (software development kit) to begin development work quickly and for free. 

Cloud SQL: This is a relational MySQL database that is completely managed and helps manage and store data. To guarantee accessibility and performance, Google takes care of patch management, database management, and replication. 

Cloud Storage: This is an object storage service that is exceptionally durable. Users can rapidly access data from your application from anywhere, by virtue of edge-caching on a worldwide scale. Google has a simple API and runs versioning to let you handle data logically. 

Google additionally provides developer tools, for example, Android Studio, Google Plugin for Eclipse, Cloud SDK, Cloud Playground, alongside the cloud platform. For more details on its services and features, you can check out here. 

2. Pricing

Google’s pricing is its biggest strength. It aims to offer cost-effective pricing techniques that beat the prices of other suppliers. As per Gartner, Google utilizes deep discounts and flexible terms to try to win ventures from customers that are as of now spending a huge amount of money while working with other cloud providers.

3. GCP Pros and Cons

Google Cloud has set up itself as a good option over AWS and Azure with its solid IaaS and PaaS services and its profound interests in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Here are some of the advantages of using GCP:

• It has an amazing reputation in the open-source community
• It is investing a lot in analytics and machine learning
• It is the best option for big data applications, ML ventures, and cloud-native applications. 

Google has a decent reputation with cloud-native startups and the open-source community, however, it has struggled to break into the enterprise market because of the below-mentioned disadvantages: 

• It is very rigid in contract negotiation
• It has a small partner ecosystem
• It has a restricted range of services for large companies

Google Cloud’s network of MSP is also restricted. Its small partner ecosystem enhances the difficulties and risks involved with the using Google Cloud Platform. 

Now, that we know all about AWS, Azure, and GCP – Let’s compare their offerings across different categories.

AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud Platform: Which Is Best For You?

	Attributes	Amazon Web Services	Microsoft Azure	Google Cloud Platform
1	Features & Services	140+ Cloud Services 19 Global Regions	600+ Services 54 Global Regions	75+ Cloud Services 18 Global Regions
2	Compute Capabilities	Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud	Virtual Machines	Compute Engine
3	Customer Base	Netflix, Airbnb, Expedia	Adobe, HP, NBC News	Twitter, Paypal, Bloomberg
4	Hybrid Support	Provides hybrid support through partnerships with on-premises providers	Comprehensive hybrid cloud support and capabilities	Introduced Hybrid Cloud Support in 2018
		Services Include: VMware Cloud on AWS, AWS Storage Gateway	Services Include: Azure Stack, Hybrid SQL Server, Azure StorSimple	Services Include: Cloud Service Platform, Google Kubernetes Engine
5	Deploying Apps and PaaS	Offers app deployment solutions but lacks in app hosting	Extensive app deployment and hosting services	Includes developer tools but has fewer PaaS capabilities
6	Open Source Developer Capabilities	Contributes to Linux, Kubernetes & more	Recently acquired GitHub	Created over 2,000 open source projects. Leads in OSC.
7	Pricing	Per-sec billing for EC2 and several other services	Per-second billing on container instances only	Per-second billing

1. AWS vs Azure vs Google: Services and Features

You must select your cloud provider depending on your business needs and workloads. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google provide the same basic functions and features. They all offer common public cloud services, including self-administration and instant provisioning, autoscaling, compliance, security, identity management features.

Azure’s administrations are to a great extent keeping pace with AWS. Google Cloud offers fewer cloud services than its rivals in the security and DevOps classes however pulls ahead in analytics and machine learning.

2. AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud Platform: Compute Capabilities

Developing and running your company begins with compute. Selecting the right compute service will permit you to proficiently create, deploy, run and scale your app and workloads.

The main computing offering of AWS is called EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) that offers an extensive selection of instance configuration for various use cases. AWS additionally gives services like Elastic Beanstalk for application development & AWS Lambda for compiling code.

Azure’s compute services are focused around Virtual Machines, which empower you to provision Windows and Linux VMs in a moment or two. Other Azure tools, for example, cloud services, functions, and app services help you rapidly make and deploy applications on the cloud.

Google’s compute engine delivers Virtual Machines in the data centers of Google. The VM’s of compute engine boot rapidly, accompany persistent disk storage and are adaptable for every workload.

3. AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud Platform: Existing Customer Base

Although, a prominent customer base shouldn’t be your primary reason to select a cloud provider, however it can assist you with understanding how the public cloud is profiting others in your industry. AWS has historically taken on huge enterprise-level deals. Azure also has some well-known customers while GCP discovered its specialty with smaller, cloud-native startups.

A number of big-sized companies utilize a multi-cloud approach to get the maximum benefits. For instance, enterprises may lean toward Google Cloud for its analytics and Machine Learning capacities yet partner with AWS or Azure for huge scale compute needs.

4. AWS vs Azure vs Google: Hybrid Cloud and Legacy Apps

A number of companies put off cloud migration since they rely on legacy applications. Not all organizations have the assets to make new applications for the cloud environment. If you depend on legacy applications or want to keep sensitive information on location data centers, pick a cloud provider with solid hybrid cloud capacities.

Azure provides the best support and capacities for hybrid clouds. It gives every one of the tools you require to create modern applications, bring together DevOps, and integrate security in hybrid environments.

5. AWS vs Azure vs Google: Deploying Apps and PaaS

One of the best advantages of cloud computing is the ease of deploying applications. AWS offers application development solutions including Elastic Beanstalk, Container Service, Lambda and Batch. But, they have less application hosting features than Azure. Microsoft has utilized its broad knowledge of developer tools to get the competitive advantage for hosting cloud apps.

Azure has a broad selection of application deployment and hosting alternatives for developers. Google Cloud empowers developers to create and deploy applications on its Google App Engine platform, however, it offers less PaaS capacities than AWS and Azure.

6. AWS vs Azure vs Google: Open Source Developer Capabilities

Open-source software is one of Google’s key advantages. Google has made 2,000+ open source ventures in the past years and has become the biggest contributor to OSS. AWS is known for welcoming Linux clients and offers many integrations for open source applications. Microsoft is also adopting open source technologies.

It opened-sourced the .NET Framework recently, and the new .NET Core runs using macOS, Windows, and Linux. About 50% of Azure VMs are running Linux, as per Microsoft.

7. AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud Platform: Pricing

AWS, Azure, and Google all follow pay-as-you-go pricing models for different services. Every one of the three sellers offers free trials to let customers try before they purchase. However, as mentioned before, it is a bit complex to understand the pricing of AWS and Azure, while Google’s pricing is simple and easy to understand.

Where to Go?

There are endless factors to consider when comparing cloud service providers. If you’re feeling confused, it is a good option to step back and see what your business needs. And, the services of which cloud platform align with your business needs.

However, in today’s multi-cloud world, you shouldn’t try to find out a single winner but rather how to ideally distribute tasks across various CSPs. As you outline your multi-cloud strategy, remember that in the key classes of storage, management tools, and computing, AWS and Azure offer a more mature stack than GCP.

All in all, the services and products of AWS are the most advanced and comprehensive, however, they can also be difficult to manage and navigate. Additionally, consider that if your organization is as of now utilizing Microsoft’s tools, servers, and office profitability applications, you will find it extremely easy to integrate with Azure.

So, that was all about AWS vs Azure vs GCP, if you require further information, you can contact our experts.