Table of Contents
Choosing the right cloud:
Learning Cloud Computing is always a difficult task, not because it is a growing and new technology field but nowadays we have so many options in cloud computing. The real confusion is to select the right cloud platform and its services.
Choosing the right cloud platform and start learning, is not an easy game. There are so many cloud providers in the market and choosing the right one from that can be a very challenging task. But we are not going to talk about all the cloud providers, we will cover the top 3. You can check the full list of the top 13 cloud providers here.
Top 3 cloud platforms:
Today we are going to talk about AWS(Amazon), Azure(Microsoft), and Google Cloud(Google) the top 3 cloud platforms currently available from the top tech giants.
There are many more participants in this race like IBM cloud, Salesforce cloud, etc but these 3 that I already told you about are currently dominating the market.
Let’s talk about AWS first, It was the first cloud service provider or platform in the cloud computing field, established in 2006. It has an extensive list of computing services with functions of deployments, mobile networking, databases, storage, and many more.
Microsoft Azure was the second and the first competitor of AWS. It was presented in Feb 2010 from Microsoft. It also provides a full set of services in the same domain as AWS.
Google Cloud started its journey on October 6, 2011. Initially, it was for Google’s own services such as Google search and Youtube. After some time they made it for public and business use.
Which one is best?
Now let’s find which one is good to start for beginners. For that, we will take some categories and see each one’s performance in each category.
- Number of Availability Zones
- Market Share
- Clients
- Services
- Pricing & Billing
1: Number of Availability Zones:
First of all what are availability zones? why it is an important feature of any cloud platform?
“Availablity zones are the isolated locations within data center regions from which public cloud services originate and operate.”
Businesses can choose multiple availability zones according to their needs of services. Choosing the right availability zone helps to reduce latency and provides easy management of resources.
According to the 2019 cloud survey, AWS has 55 availability zones, Azure has 44 and Google Cloud has 18 availability zones. As AWS is the oldest cloud service provider it has more availability zones than any other cloud provider. So in this category AWS is the winner!
2: Market Share:-
From the below graph, you can say that AWS has more popularity in the marketplace than any other cloud platform. It is leading with 40% of the public cloud market share.
Google Cloud and Azure are also not so far from AWS. Azure holds 30% and the latecomer Google Cloud with more than 10%.
You can also check the popularity of each cloud platform countrywide using Google trends.
3: Clients & Services:
Now let’s find out who is using which cloud platform? Let’s first talk about AWS. It provides 200+ services based on 4 primary categories Compute, Database, Storage, Troubleshooting, and Monitoring so that it is the first choice of all customers.
You can get an idea of each service of AWS from the below picture. AWS has clients like Netflix, Adobe, Samsung, BBC, Baidu, and many more big names. You can check the customer list here:
Azure is also not so far in this race. It provides 100+ services in above mentioned primary domains. Azure has clients like Apple, BMW, Pixer, Roll Royce, Dell, Apollo hospitals, Citrix, and many more.
Same as Azure but Google Cloud also provides 80+ services in defined primary domains. It has customers like Paypal, Twitter, P&G, Airbus, Sky, UPS, etc. Okay, now let’s talk about the services in deep. We will categorize services into 5 primary domains.
- Compute
- Database
- Storage
- Troubleshooting
- Monitoring
For computing, AWS has EC2 as a compute engine. It will take a few minutes to create an instance. If you talk about Azure then it has a Virtual Machine to load an instance, which is slower than AWS. But if you need a faster option than you can go with Google Cloud. It has Cloud Engine which takes seconds to launch the instance.
For database, AWS has RDS( Relational-Database-Services), which has the support of MySQL, Oracle, MariaDB, MongoDB, etc. Whereas Azure has SQL Database Service and Google cloud has SQL database.
4: Pricing & Billing:
In the case of pricing and billing customers always try to focus on lower price platforms. For the lower pricing module, AWS can’t be adjusted. Why? You will get an idea from the below comparison.
From the above comparison, you can get an idea that Google Cloud is a much cheaper option than the other two platforms.
All of the three cloud platforms have the option of reserved instances, which means you can reserve instances for a specific time period, and in return, you will get a good amount of discount. But this discount depends on the time period that you choose for reserving an instance.
We have explored so much about these 3 cloud platforms now it’s time for the conclusion.
Final Conclusion:
Which one to choose? If you are looking for a cloud platform that has global reach, good features and more open source tools with better offerings than you can go with AWS.
If you are looking for a cloud platform that has a lower cost, good service integration with DevOps, and speed as a major factor then you can choose Google Cloud. Also, you can start with Azure if you want more reliable integration with Microsoft tools and expert services in the development and testing domain. It also gives you the option of a hybrid cloud.
