The competition for dominating the cloud world has become a fierce race between the three incredible and leading market leaders – AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. They keep adding features, modifying their prices, and trying different strategies to win that “cloud throne.”
However, each has its own set of perks and drawbacks, depending on the use case. If you are just starting out on these technologies, you will have confusion for sure. So, here is a quick comparison of AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud to help you understand which is better and why?
Before we explain and give you a comparison between these three vendors, let’s start with some statistics.
AWS
Over its past four quarters—from the fourth quarter of 2021 to the third quarter of 2022—Amazon Web Services (AWS) generated $76.5 billion in revenue. If AWS grows sales at a similar rate in 2023 as it did in 2022, the cloud market share leader will surpass the $100 billion threshold next year.
Source: Statista
Microsoft Azure
While Amazon has a clear, separate revenue pouring in from AWS, Microsoft has a hazier “commercial cloud business” – because it not just includes Azure but Dynamics 365, Office 365, and other components of the Productivity & Business Process Division. Though this might be frustrating to many users, it simply cannot be compared to AWS directly.
In a recent report from Microsoft, Azure generated a revenue of about $75.3 billion in 2022. The number of Azure users worldwide is approaching the 1 billion mark. Currently, Azure’s market share is 21% in the cloud computing industry. (Source)
Looking at the trend, Azure’s growth rate is going down every quarter from 2022. But this is totally normal. When revenue numbers go high, sustaining the same progress is usually difficult.
Source: Statista
Google Cloud
According to Alphabet 2023 report, Google Cloud posted an income of $191 million in the Q1 2023 earnings report for the three-month period ending March 31.
Google Cloud achieved its first-ever profitable quarter after recording losses of $706 million in the corresponding period last year. Despite being the third-largest hyper-scale in the global cloud market with an 11% share of cloud spending during the last quarter of 2022, Google Cloud had been lagging behind AWS and Microsoft.
Source: Statista
The Market Share: 2021 Vs 2022
Canalys, a well-known analyst firm, reported that spending on cloud infrastructure services worldwide rose by 23% YoY in Q4 2022, reaching US$65.8 billion, which is a growth of US$12.3 billion. For the entire year 2022, the total expenditure on cloud infrastructure services increased by 29% to US$247.1 billion, up from US$191.7 billion in 2021. Canalys predicts that in 2023, global spending on cloud infrastructure services will increase by 23% for the full year, which is lower than the 29% growth in 2022.
In Q4 2022, AWS led the cloud infrastructure services market, accounting for 32% of the total expenditure. Microsoft Azure held 23% of the global market share for cloud infrastructure services and remained the second-largest provider with a YoY growth rate of 31%. Google Cloud was the third-largest provider of cloud services and outpaced both AWS and Azure, with a YoY growth rate of 36% to capture 10% of the market share.
Source: Canalys
AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud Market Share: The Winner
As of the fourth quarter of 2022, Amazon, via AWS, owns a 33 percent share of the global cloud services market followed by Microsoft, via Azure, at 23 percent share; then Google, via Google Cloud, at 11 percent market share, according to data from Synergy Research Group.
It is obvious that AWS is in the lead.
During a recent CNBC interview, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was asked whether AWS could become the largest enterprise company in the world. Jassy responded by saying, “It has the chance, I think, to be a really large business. And I think if we were able to accomplish the right type of customer experience… as the market moves more and more toward cloud, I think we have a chance to be the largest enterprise company in the world.”
That being said, it will be interesting to witness the strategies employed by AWS’s competitors.
AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud: A Quick Comparison
Choosing the best CSP (Cloud Service Provider) is a hard decision. The scenario isn’t about what option you want to go with but rather how your business can accomplish optimal performance and further distribute risks across various vendors—while covering the cloud’s storage & compute costs at the same time.
According to Forrester, currently, 92% of organizations have implemented a multi-cloud strategy, and 82% of large enterprises have incorporated a hybrid cloud infrastructure. On average, organizations are utilizing 2.6 public and 2.7 private clouds.
As far as the survey reports are considered, we can learn that adopting multi-cloud strategies can:
- Save cost
- Improve performance
- Enhance delivery times
Discover how we enabled our client to accelerate their business growth by migrating and modernizing their applications using a Multi-Cloud Approach.
Service-to-Service Comparison
Typically, enterprises look to cloud service providers for 3 service levels:
- IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) – the “storage & computing” capacity
- PaaS (Platform as a Service) – the entire environments to develop, deploy, and manage the web apps)
- SaaS (Software as a Service) – the performance and secured hosting for the applications.
Note: We are not going to compare pricing of these services, as it is complicated to achieve apples-to-apples kind of comparisons without a clear use case. After you determine your business’s CSP requirements, calculate the price of each CSP to check if there is any significant cost difference. This is the ideal way to choose a vendor.
1. Storage
AWS, Azure, and GCP – all offer an extensive range of objects, file storage, and blocks for use cases involving both primary as well as secondary storage.
While object storage is great for handling huge amounts of unstructured data (videos, images, etc.), block storage offers enhanced performance to structured data (transactional).
The storage tiers offer various accessibility & latency levels to meet the requirements of both inactive (cold) and active (hot) data cost-effectively.
| AWS | Azure | Google Cloud | |
|---|---|---|---|
| VM Disk Storage | Amazon EBS | Azure Managed Disk | Compute engine documentation |
| Object Storage | S3 Intelligent-Tiering | Blob Storage | Google’s Object Storage |
| Disaster Recovery | AWS Disaster Recovery | Azure Site Recovery | Google Cloud VMware Engine |
| Backup Recovery | AWS Backup | Azure Backup | Google Cloud Backup |
| Transfer of Bulk Data | ~ AWS Import & Export ~ AWS SnowMobile ~ AWS Snowball – based on the device |
Azure Data Box family of products | Transfer service for storage |
| Archive Storage | Modernize data archiving | Azure’s long-term storage: ~ Archive Storage (offers blob storage offline) ~ Cool Blob Storage (less availability when compared to “Hot”) |
|
| Hybrid Support | Hybrid and Multi Cloud Platform |
2. Compute
AWS, Azure, and GCP – all offer a comprehensive range of predefined instances, which define every virtual server that is launched, RAM, CPU (or GPU) processor type, the number of vGPU/vCPU cores, and local storage (temporary).
The predefined instance type will determine:
- Compute speed
- I/O speed
- Performance parameters
It lets you to optimize performance/price based on the workload requirement.
These cloud service providers offer pay-as-you-go options to handle the scaling, deployment, and balancing of web apps automatically, given that they are built in leading frameworks like Node.js, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, etc.
| AWS | Azure | Google Cloud | |
|---|---|---|---|
| PaaS | Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk | App Service | GAE (Google App Engine) |
| Virtual servers | Amazon EC2 | Virtual Machine for Windows/Linux server | Google’s Compute Engine |
| Support for VPS (Virtual Private Server) | Amazon Lightsail | VM (Virtual Machine) Image | Virtual Private Cloud |
| Scaling | Amazon’s Auto-scaling | Azure’s Auto-scale | Google Cloud Autoscaler |
3. Management Tools
Managing & orchestrating your cloud resources across diverse business units as well as other complex infrastructures is a challenge.
Happily, all these three cloud platforms provide visibility and helps in streamlining your organizational processes. Their services range from catalogues of approved services to predefined deployment templates and centralized access control.
| AWS | Azure | Google Cloud | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Templates for cloud deployment |
Amazon’s CloudFormation: ~ Provisions cloud resources. |
Azure’s Resource Manager: ~ Deploy and control access to resources that are categorized; includes templates |
|
| Server management services |
~ Automation and visibility across resources |
Google Cloud Operations Suite | |
| Server automation | Amazon OpsWorks | Azure Desired State Configuration | Google Cloud Deployment Manager |
| Logging and Monitoring | Azure Monitor | Google Cloud Monitoring |
Conclusion
Rather than going with the “best,” identify how you will distribute your workloads optimally across various CSPs. When you try to implement your multi-cloud strategies, remember that the principal categories of computing, management tools, and storage in Azure & AWS offer a mature and comprehensive stack when compared to GCP.
Generally, the products and services offered by AWS are the most wide-ranging, but they are equally challenging to manage and navigate. Also, see if your organization is using Microsoft’s development tools, Office productivity apps, or Windows servers. If yes, then you will find Azure pretty straightforward to integrate.
Considering the complexity of managing and navigating wide-ranging products, it becomes essential to carefully select the right cloud partner. The recognition of CTG as a leading cloud consultant partner highlights their expertise and proficiency in assisting businesses with their cloud-related needs. With a proven track record of success and a commitment to delivering reliable solutions, CTG has solidified its position as a trusted and capable partner in the cloud consulting industry.
Note: This post was originally published on May 31, 2019, and has been completely revamped and updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
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