The cloud computing market is expected to reach $2,291.59 billion by 2032, according to a Fortune Business Insight report. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud are the three big players in this market, holding 66% of the total market share. These cloud giants will likely be your top choices when hosting a website or application.
- AWS offers a massive ecosystem with many solutions, including computing, storage, networking, database analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
- Azure seamlessly integrates with Microsoft products and focuses on enterprise solutions.
- Google Cloud is known for data analytics and machine learning (ML) capabilities.
Understanding the unique strengths of each will help you choose the correct cloud platform for you. In this article, we’ll compare AWS, Azure, and GCP for their services, features, ease of use, AI/ML applications, hybrid cloud capabilities, and security and compliance.
Featured Partners: Remote Monitoring & Management Software
AWS vs. Azure vs. Google Cloud Comparison
The following table shows the comparison of AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud platforms based on the services they offer to their clients:
| AWS | Microsoft Azure | Google Cloud | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Compute | EC2, Lambda, Lightsail, Batch, APP Runner, ECS | Virtual Machines, Azure Functions, App Services, Kubernetes Service, Container Apps, Batch, LVM | Compute Engine, Cloud Functions, App Engine, VMware Engine, Cloud Run, Recommender, Google Kubernetes Engine |
| Storage | S3, EBS, EFS, Backup, Glacier, Elastic Data Recovery | Data Lake Storage, Disk Storage, File Storage, Container Storage, Blob Storage, Azure NetApp Files | Cloud Storage, Persistent Disk, Filestore, Storage Transfer Service, Transfer Appliance, Nearline |
| Databases | RDS, SimpleDB, DynamoDB, DocumentDB, Aurora, RDS, Redshift | Azure Arc, Azure Stack, Azure SQL, Cosmos DB, Cache for Redis, Database Migration Service, Azure Database for MySQL, Azure Database for PostgreSQL | Cloud SQL, Firestore, Bigtable, Memorystore, Spanner, Datastream, AlloyDB |
| Machine learning (ML) | AmazonQ, SageMaker, Augmented AI, Bedrock, Amazon Q, CodeGuru, Comprehend, Forecast | Azure ML, Cognitive Search, OpenAI Service, AI Speech, AI Vision, AI Content Safety, DevOps | Gemini, Looker, Vertex AI Platform, AutoML, Dialogflow, Natural Language, Vision AI, Video AI |
| Security & identity | IAM, Shield, Cognito, Detective, Inspector, GuardDuty | Application Gateway, Microsoft Sentinel, Key Vault, Azure Firewall, Web Application Firewall, Azure DDoS Protection | IAM, Cloud IDS, Cloud Armor, Identity Platform, Cloud Key Management, Cloud Data Loss Prevention, Identity-Aware Proxy |
| Pay-as-you-go pricing | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Visit AWS | Visit Microsoft Azure | Visit Google Cloud |
If the above criteria are not insufficient to help you make an informed choice, you can check out their websites for more product and service criteria. Keep reading for more information about each provider.
What is Amazon Web Services (AWS)?
AWS currently holds the market leader position with a 31% share, according to a Statista report, making it a highly sought-after cloud computing solution. It provides fully featured on-demand cloud services for individuals, start-ups, enterprises, and government agencies, offering computing power, storage options, and networking capabilities.
- Market Share: 31% market share worldwide with an annual growth rate of 37%, as highlighted in a recent report.
- Launch Year: 2006
- Region: 34 geographic regions, 108 Availability zones, and 13 Regional Edge Caches worldwide. AWS also plans for six more regions and 18 more availability zones.
AWS key differentiators
Some of AWS’s more distinct features include compute cloud, distributed ledgers, serverless services, the Internet of Things (IoT), AI, Containers, and more.
- Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2): EC2 is a comprehensive computing platform that enables users to run virtual machines (VMs) and scale computing power while supporting Intel, AMD, Arm processors, and GPU-powered servers for intensive computing.
- Blockchain on AWS: AWS provides users with the tools to build unique blockchain networks and access a vast ecosystem of 70+ validated blockchain solutions from its partners.
- Serverless computing: AWS serverless technologies for code execution, application integration, and data management include automatic scalability and built-in high availability.
- IoT services: AWS IoT Core and other IoT services connect billions of devices while collecting, storing, and analyzing IoT data for industrial, consumer, automotive, and commercial applications.
- Strong ecosystem: AWS includes an extensive ecosystem of third-party integrations and a strong community, which provides considerable support and resources.
AWS pricing
With more than 200 cloud services, AWS offers pay-as-you-go pricing based on the services used, but specific pricing information beyond AWS’s pricing calculator isn’t provided. AWS offers flexible pricing for various computing instances and storage based on stored and accessed data. Capacity and usage trends determine storage costs for Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS. Discounts are available through reserved instances and AWS saving plans with upfront payments. For more details, please check Amazon Pricing.
AWS pros and cons
AWS is a global cloud platform with a wide range of services suitable for various use cases, industries, and organizations. The platform also benefits from a vast global reach, ensuring its services are low latency and comply with regional data regulations. AWS offers a 12-month free tier on over 40 services to provide hands-on experience with the platform.
However, many services on the platform can be overwhelming and require specific skills. The pricing model, while flexible, can be complicated and result in unexpected costs. Also, AWS’s emphasis on a broad service offering can sometimes result in less attention to specialized services.
If you prefer a more specialized cloud platform, consider Google Cloud Platform. It’s quite thorough despite having fewer unique offerings.
What is Microsoft Azure
Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing service that empowers businesses to develop, test, deploy, and manage their applications and services. Azure provides various services, including computing, data and analytics, hybrid cloud, security and governance, and cloud migration.
- Market Share: Azure is growing faster than AWS, with a 25% global market share (sourced from a market share report) and an annual growth rate of 46%.
- Launch Year: 2010
- Region: Microsoft Azure operates in 60 regions, 113 availability zones, and 192 edge locations.
Azure key differentiators
Azure’s offering includes on-premises, multi-cloud, edge solutions, cloud migration tools and services, vast artificial intelligence (AI) solutions, blockchain services, and cloud security services. Azure functions allow you to run event-driven functions without the burden of infrastructure management.
- Strong focus on hybrid cloud: Azure provides an extensive array of tools for hybrid cloud environments to simplify the integration of on-premises data centers with the cloud.
- Freedom to build and support any application: Azure is not just for Windows-based services. It also supports open-source technologies and platforms, allowing everyone to create and maintain any application.
- Migration and modernization: Users have tools, resources, and guidance to ease and accelerate their cloud migration and modernization.
- Azure AI: Azure offers AI services for data scientists and developers, cutting across vision, language, speech, and decision-making models.
- Web3 services: With Azure, organizations can implement blockchain as a service to build, deploy, and scale decentralized applications.
- Security and governance: Services such as Azure governance, backup and disaster recovery, network security, and confidential computing ensure cloud security.
Azure pricing
Like AWS, Azure offers many distinct products and uses a pay-as-you-go model.
Azure pros and cons
One of Azure’s greatest strengths is its seamless integration with Microsoft products, making it an excellent choice for businesses already invested in the Microsoft ecosystem. Its emphasis on hybrid cloud solutions makes data management more flexible. Also, the platform provides powerful AI and blockchain tools, catering to businesses with data-intensive requirements and those focused on decentralized apps.
However, Azure has a greater learning curve than other platforms, and its focus on enterprise solutions may make it unsuitable for small businesses. Although it has a clear pricing model, the structure can still be complex, resulting in unexpected costs. However, you can always contact Azure Sales to ensure that you receive accurate pricing information.
What is Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a collection of Google’s cloud computing services that deliver products across AI and ML, compute, storage, databases, data analytics, developer tools, and networking. The platform provides customizable virtual machine instances with both predefined and custom options. This means that you can select the exact specifications that you need for your project.
- Market Share: It is the fastest-growing, with a recent study stating 10% market share worldwide.
- Launch Year: 2008
- Region: GCP comprises 40 cloud regions, 121 zones, and is available in 200+ countries.
Google Cloud key differentiators
GCP customers benefit from several capabilities, including hybrid and multi-cloud deployments, big data analytics, AI-powered code and applications, customizable VMs, and scalable and serverless databases.
- Open source and multi-cloud: Google Cloud Platform is designed with an open architecture that supports multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments.
- Data analytics strength: GCP excels in big data analytics and offers dozens of tools like BigQuery for high-speed SQL queries and Looker for business intelligence.
- AI and ML emphasis: Customers can build generative AI applications and conversational AI products, generate AI-powered code, and more with Google’s strong focus on AI and ML.
- Compute Engine: Google Cloud’s Compute Engine enables customers to build and run customizable VMs, automatically deploy containers, and migrate applications.
- Fully managed databases: GCP uses fully managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, and SQL Server databases to lower its clients’ maintenance costs and help them develop rich applications.
GCP pricing
GCP pricing is flexible, following a pay-as-you-go model. Google encourages prospective users to contact them for a quote. One advantage they offer over competitors is that new customers receive $300 in free credits to run, test, and deploy their workloads.
GCP pros and cons
GCP plays a significant role in the development of many open-source technologies. Its open architecture makes it suitable for multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments. The platform also strongly emphasizes AI and ML, providing advanced capabilities. Google Cloud is also strong in Kubernetes, with an advanced platform for containerized applications. Additionally, GCP excels at conducting cutting-edge research.
Still, Google Cloud has a smaller community than AWS, which could lead to fewer third-party integrations and community support. Also, the platform’s focus on data analytics may overshadow its other offerings. If community support and a larger number of integrations are important to you, consider AWS instead.
Best for pricing: Google Cloud Platform
Regarding pricing, GCP is the clear winner among the three cloud solutions. It provides sustained use discounts, which result in lower costs for continuous use of specific services and custom and preemptible virtual machines.
When you combine that with Google’s innovative pricing models and generous free tiers and credits for new customers and small businesses, GCP’s pricing appears to be as aggressive as AWS or Azure.
However, AWS and Azure both provide compelling pricing features, and the best pricing features may differ depending on a client’s use case. To address these variations in pricing, each provider provides a pricing calculator to assist prospective users in estimating how much a product will cost.
Best for core features: AWS
AWS has the most comprehensive service catalog, with more than 250 offerings. It distinguishes itself not only by the number of services it provides but also by their quality. AWS offers solutions in almost every cloud niche, from foundational services like EC2 for computing and S3 for storage to more specialized offerings in analytics, IoT, machine learning, serverless, and supply chain.
With these services, AWS has a global network with many data centers spread across multiple regions and availability zones, ensuring high availability, fault tolerance, and scalability for any application. Business leaders’ widespread use of AWS across multiple sectors proves its ability to meet many cloud computing requirements.
Best for ease of implementation: Azure
It depends on the use case, but Azure wins over the other two providers because of the Microsoft ecosystem’s prevalence. Azure is fully compatible with the Microsoft ecosystem, which makes moving to the cloud or a hybrid environment easier. Azure also puts significant effort into its hybrid cloud solutions and is especially good at putting together business services.
Still, AWS and Google Cloud might be easier to set up in situations where their specific strengths better suit the project’s needs. AWS’s wide range of services and global infrastructure may make setting up highly scalable global applications easier. On the other hand, Google Cloud’s strengths in data analytics and machine learning may make it better for projects that focus on these areas.
Best for AI and ML applications: GCP
Google Cloud stands out when it comes to AI and ML apps. Its Vertex AI platform is especially good for making ML models because it is clean, easy to use, and uses a containerized approach.
Vertex AI works with many of Google’s AI and machine learning tools (i.e., TensorFlow) and many AI APIs for speech, language, images, and structured data. It’s a complete solution for developers and data scientists who want to use the newest AI technology.
Google’s emphasis on AI applications is demonstrated by the platform’s focus on open-source technologies and its key role in creating Kubernetes for orchestration.
Best for Hybrid Cloud Capabilities: Azure
Azure’s hybrid cloud capabilities offer seamless integration with existing Microsoft environments like Windows Server, Active Directory, and SQL Server and provide a cohesive experience, especially for businesses deeply entrenched in Microsoft’s ecosystem.
With Azure Stack, you can use Azure’s cloud services in on-premises environments, making the hybrid cloud experience truly consistent. Because of this, businesses can build and launch apps in the same way, whether in the cloud or on-premises. This makes it very flexible and gives you smooth control over where workloads reside.
Best for Security and Compliance: Azure
Cloud providers must keep focus on security and compliance for cloud infrastructure, data, and hosted applications. With its emphasis on compliance and security features, Azure suits industries with strict data regulations. Azure offers Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) for more granular access controls. As part of the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP), Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) and Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) enable cloud administrators to assign specific permissions based on organizational roles.
This ensures that users and services in Azure have minimal access rights. Azure’s Key Vault stores secrets like passwords and keys, and supports storing certificates.
Bottom line: the choice is up to you
When choosing the best cloud provider, consider which platform gives you an optimal combination of the features you want and the price you can afford. This way, your teams won’t have to work too hard as your cloud needs grow. When you use the price calculator on each platform, include all the costs you expect. You should also think about where your data center is located to ensure it has the best performance and is easy for your users to get to.
In this article, we compared the different features and services offered by AWS, Azure, and GCP to their customers. We also learned which cloud provider is the best for pricing, core features, AI/ML usage, hybrid cloud capabilities, and security and compliance.
FAQs
What are the big three cloud providers?
AWS, Azure, and GCP are the top three cloud providers. AWS is the market leader with a 31% global market share, Azure has 25%, and GCP has 10%. These three cloud infrastructure giants cover 66% of cloud spending.
What are the key differences between serverless and virtual machine computing?
Serverless computing is designed to be event-driven. As a result, it can respond to various events and initiate actions in real time. When you choose virtual machines, you must manually manage and configure the infrastructure to handle increased loads.
What unique cloud computing platforms does Google Cloud offer that are distinct from AWS and Azure?
Google Cloud Platform provides BigQuery and Google Kubernetes Engine. GPC’s expertise in big data analytics and container management distinguishes it from similar services offered by AWS and Azure.
Which cloud platform offers extensive object storage solutions, and how do they compare among the top cloud providers?
AWS offers Amazon S3 for object storage, Azure has Azure Blob Storage, and Google Cloud has Google Cloud Storage. AWS leads in terms of integrated features and a mature ecosystem.