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

Planning to build a robust app? How will you host it?

When you are building an app, you want it to do a plethora of things for you and your business. These things include managing users, synchronizing data across various devices, store and share data, get you real-time stats and much more.

To help your app perform all these tasks seamlessly, you need a perfect hosting service that allows you to build scalable mobile apps and backend infrastructure without having to be caught up in the intricacies of managing servers.

That’s where cloud hosting comes into play. The industry “Cloud Computing” has grown to a huge extent in the last few years because of its unbeatable computing power, reliability, and unmatched scalability.

More and more businesses are adopting the cloud at one point or another. And because of the same, the industry is booming. Now, the question is which cloud platform you should use to host your web or mobile app?

While the cloud computing market is flooded with numerous cloud service providers – Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google cloud platform are the leaders of the domain. If you are confused between the three of them and couldn’t find out which one you should use, this blog is for you.

Here, we will discuss AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud Platform to conclude which is best among the three. So, let’s get started.

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?

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.