Comparing the Big Three Cloud Providers: AWS vs Azure vs GCP

First, while we are talking about the cloud...

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In the modern world of cloud computing, there is an almost infinite amount of choices for launching your compute services, your networking, and anything else required to build and launch your applications. This is allowing builders to be ever more innovative and bold when designing applications.

With Global Cloud spending trending towards half a trillion dollars in 2022, there is no shortage for all cloud providers to scale and grow in whichever way the customer requires.

In this article, we are discussing the relative advantages and disadvantages of each of the three major Cloud Providers for various workloads, based on different criteria. This guide is not designed to recommend any one Cloud Provider more than others - it is simply a matter-of-fact representation of scale, cost, feature availability, and ease-of-use (amongst more) of each of the three vendors, so you can make your own mind up.

Let's dive into some key similarities and differences, starting with the Global Infrastructure.

AWS Global Infrastructure

Currently, the AWS Cloud covers 84 Availability Zones in 26 different geographic regions around the world, and there are plans to add 24 more Availability Zones and 8 more AWS Regions to the service in Australia, India, Indonesia, Israel, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, and United Arab Emirates (UAE).

AWS has a concept called a Region, which is a geographical location around the world where they cluster its data centers in order to carry out its services. Each logical group of a data center in the system is referred to as an Availability Zone. The AWS Regions are composed of a number of isolated and physically separated AZs within a given geographical area within the AWS cloud.

While other cloud providers often define a region as a single data center, AWS Regions offer a number of advantages for customers over other cloud providers, who may define a region as a single data center. Power, cooling, and physical security are independent for each AZ, as well as redundant, ultra-low-latency networks that connect the AZs.

Azure Global Infrastructure

The Azure geography refers to a discrete market, typically containing one or more regions, that preserves the boundaries of data residency and compliance. Geographies allow customers with specific data residency and compliance needs to keep their data and applications close. Geography is fault-tolerant in the sense that it can support the complete failure of one geographical region due to its connection to a dedicated high-capacity networking infrastructure within Azure.

Azure regions are a collection of datacentres that are deployed within a latency-defined perimeter and are connected via a dedicated low-latency network within the region.

The Azure Availability Zones are a unique physical location within the Azure region where your applications and data are protected from the failure of a datacentre, allowing them to run continuously. Zones consist of one or more data centers equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking.

Google Cloud Platform Infrastructure

The cloud infrastructure of GCP is built around 20+ regions, 70+ zones, and 140+ network edge locations.

Multi-regions are large geographic areas, such as the United States, that contain two or more geographic places, and Regions are collections of zones that provide high-bandwidth, low-latency network connections to other zones in the same region. Regional resources can be used by any resource in that region, regardless of the zone and generally, communication within regions will always be cost-efficient and faster than communication across different regions.

Finally, Zones are isolated locations within a region and are composed of several physical infrastructures housed in a data center called a cluster. Resources that live in a zone such as virtual machines or persistent disks are referred to as zonal resources.

Now let's talk about the overall market share of the big three. This is perfectly summed up by the below graphic, which includes the eight top cloud providers overall:

As you can see, AWS take the lead with a whopping?34%?of the market share in Q2 2022, followed by Azure, and GCP in third place. AWS is clearly winning here due to its head start in the cloud industry (having essentially created it) and its breadth and depth of services.

Next, let's discuss which large companies are using each cloud platform.

AWS Main Customers

Here are some of the biggest monthly spenders on AWS currently;

Netflix: $19 million

Twitch: $15 million

LinkedIn: $13 million

Facebook: $11 million

Turner Broadcasting: $10 million

BBC: $9 million

Baidu: $9 million

ESPN: $8 million

Adobe: $8 million

Twitter: $7 million

Azure Main Customers

Here are some of the biggest Azure customers, also per month:

Verizon: $7 million

MSI Computer: $6.5 million

LG Electronics: $6.2 million

CenturyLink: $6.3 million

NTT America: $4 million

Wikimedia Foundation: $3.5 million

LinkedIn Corp: $3.4 million

News Corp: $3.2 million

Adobe: $2.8 million

Intel: $2.5 million

Google Cloud Platform Main Customers

Finally, let's look at Google Clouds' biggest customers.

Verizon: $7 million

Twitch Interactive: $6.4 million

CenturyLink: $5.9 million

LinkedIn Corp: $4.7 million

NewsCorp: $4.3 million

SAP: $4 million

Facebook, Inc: $ 3.5 million

Intel: $3.3 million

Yahoo: $4.1 million

Marriott International: $3.2 million

Another useful thing to understand about each cloud platform is its hybrid cloud functionality. Let's compare each of them.

Hybrid Cloud on AWS

AWS shine when it comes to hybrid tools on AWS. Here is a short list of some of the most powerful AWS Hybrid services:

AWS Outposts

AWS Outposts allows you to run AWS infrastructure and services on-premises for a consistent hybrid experience. With AWS Outposts, you can run some AWS services locally and connect to a broad range of services available in the local AWS Region. Run applications and workloads on-premises using familiar AWS services, tools, and APIs. Outposts support workloads and devices requiring low latency access to on-premises systems, local data processing, data residency, and application migration with local system interdependencies.?

AWS Storage Gateway

AWS Storage Gateway is a set of hybrid cloud storage services that provide on-premises access to virtually unlimited cloud storage. To support these use cases, the service provides four different types of gateways – Tape Gateway, Amazon S3 File Gateway, Amazon FSx File Gateway, and Volume Gateway – that seamlessly connect on-premises applications to cloud storage, caching data locally for low-latency access.

AWS Direct Connect

AWS Direct Connect links your internal network to an AWS Direct Connect location over a standard Ethernet fiber-optic cable. One end of the cable is connected to your router, the other to an AWS Direct Connect router. With this connection, you can create?virtual interfaces?directly to public AWS services (for example, to Amazon S3) or to Amazon VPC, bypassing internet service providers in your network path. An AWS Direct Connect location provides access to AWS in the Region with which it is associated. You can use a single connection in a public Region or AWS GovCloud (US) to access public AWS services in all other public Regions.

Hybrid Cloud on Azure

Azure also offers a range of Hybrid Cloud services:

To help you achieve the benefits of a hybrid cloud, Azure offers services to help you connect your private cloud with their public services. These services include a variety of helpful features. You can run applications seamlessly across on-premises, cloud, and edge environments

For an Azure hybrid cloud to function optimally, you need to combine several services. These services are in addition to networking and security measures. Below are some of the most commonly used services:

• Azure Arc—enables you to extend Azure management tools and services to any architecture. With it, you can run and manage Azure data services across your environments.
• Azure Stack—enables you to develop, deploy, and run cloud-compatible applications across environments. You can operate these applications either on or offline.
• Azure IoT Edge—a fully managed service that enables you to run workloads in containers on Internet of Things (IoT) edge devices. Running these workloads on the edge limits communication delays, allows faster response to change demands, and enables offline operations.
• Azure Sphere—provides turnkey security for IoT devices. It enables you to protect privacy, data, and infrastructure while ensuring the physical safety of devices.
• Azure StorSimple?- a series of devices that are deployed on-premise and synchronize data to the Azure cloud. Devices are available in three deployment options: StorSimple Physical Array, Virtual Array, and Cloud Appliance.

Azure enables you to run applications as is or to refactor and take advantage of cloud scalability and portability. It also enables you to create new, cloud-native applications.

Hybrid Cloud on GCP

Finally let's check out Google Cloud's hybrid cloud solutions:

A few years ago, Google announced the general availability of?Anthos, an enterprise hybrid, and multi-cloud platform.

At the heart of Anthos is the most popular open source project of our times – Kubernetes. Anthos is built on the firm foundation of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and is broken down into a few building blocks:

1) Google Kubernetes Engine

This is the central command and control center of Anthos. Customers use the GKE control plane to manage the distributed infrastructure running in Google's cloud, on-premise data center, and other cloud platforms.

2) GKE On-prem

Google is delivering a Kubernetes-based software platform that’s consistent with GKE. Customers can deploy this on any compatible hardware and Google will manage the platform. From upgrading the version of Kubernetes to applying the latest patches, Google will treat it as a logical extension of GKE. It’s important to note that GKE On-prem runs as a virtual appliance on top of VMware vSphere 6.5. The support for other hypervisors such as Hyper-V and KVM is in the works.

3) GCP Cloud Interconnect

No hybrid cloud platform is complete without high-speed connectivity between the enterprise data center and the cloud infrastructure. Cloud Interconnect can deliver speeds up to 100Gbps while connecting the data center with the cloud. Customers can also use Telco networks offered by Equinix, NTT Communications, Softbank, and others for extending their data center to GCP.

Finally, let's compare the overall pros and cons of each of the major cloud providers.

AWS Pros and Cons

It is no brainer that AWS is the biggest player in the cloud computing industry, covering a total market share of about 33 percent. One of the obvious reasons for this popularity is the 200+ managed services offered by AWS and the ease with which they can be used.

In addition to this, there are several other advantages that make AWS a prime market player. It has a massive scope of operations and a comprehensive network of worldwide data centers. With its ease of providing scalability and holistic security to its users, AWS has become the most mature and enterprise-ready provider.

Besides having these advantages, AWS has a drawback in its pricing strategy. While organizations find AWS to be the most suitable cloud service provider, they are often perplexed about its pricing strategy. Even after constantly reducing its prices, many enterprises find it difficult to understand AWS’s cost structure and to manage those costs effectively while running high-volume workloads on the service.

Microsoft Azure: Pros and Cons

Microsoft entered the cloud market by taking its on-premise services, such as Windows Server, Office, SQL Server, SharePoint, and others, to the cloud. This helps Microsoft to carve out its competitors as Azure is integrated with other applications that are popularly used by a majority of organizations. In addition, Microsoft also gives significant discounts to its customers on service contracts.

Some of the areas where Microsoft falls short are the maintenance required for the platform and the high expertise needed to use Azure. However, the ample advantages of the platform often outweigh its disadvantages, and organizations trust Azure for their on-cloud requirements.

Google Cloud: Pros and Cons

Google Cloud which comes along with Google Workspace is a strong competitor when it comes to offering cloud services. It started its offerings in containers since Google developed the Kubernetes standard that is now offered by AWS and Azure. Specializing in high compute offerings, such as big data, analytics, and machine learning, Google cloud offers considerable scaling and load balancing capabilities.

While Google Cloud has certain advantages, it also has a few drawbacks. Google does not have a traditional relationship with organizational customers. However, it is quickly expanding its offerings and footprint of global data centers. In the future, we can expect Google Cloud to be a tougher competitor to Amazon and Azure.

So who do you think takes the price for the best Cloud Provider? Or is the future Multi-Cloud?

You decide!