With the immense growth in the adoption of cloud computing, businesses struggle with the right choice of a cloud platform for their organization. AWS, Azure, and GCP are considered as the “Big 3” cloud providers. But how can you decide which one is the right platform for your use case? In this article, we have discussed each platform in detail, which will help you compare them thoroughly to make the right decision. 

Amazon Web Services

AWS is a cloud platform provided by Amazon itself. It is a flexible, reliable, cost-effective, and easy-to-use cloud platform that allows cloud applications like:

  • SaaS hosting
  • Website hosting
  • Mobile and social applications
  • Development and test environments
  • Social networking
  • Storage
  • Backup and disaster recovery, etc. 

There are several benefits offered by AWS which make it the right choice for you:

  • It provides fast deployments.
  • It navigates multi-cloud deployments.
  • It has hybrid capabilities.
  • You can pay only for the services you use without worrying about any long-term commitments or up-front costs. 
  • It offers high-end security. 
  • It is the cloud platform with the most operational experience. 
  • It has a massively diverse community with many active customers and global partners.
  • It is suitable for companies of all sizes across multiple industries. 
  • It offers powerful machine learning and deep learning capabilities. 

Although the advantages are numerous, there are certain limitations to AWS, which you must be aware of in order to make a well-informed decision. As the platform offers a sheer number of options in terms of services, newcomers can be overwhelmed. Also, you would have to purchase dev/enterprise support, and even then, the options for hybrid cloud will be comparatively limited as compared to other options. 

Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

A product of Google, GCP is a highly-efficient cloud platform that offers multiple benefits like:

  • It is a leading hybrid cloud storage vendor. 
  • It offers highly-efficient computing resources for developing, deploying, and operating applications on the Web. 
  • It is well-known for its services in data analytics, computing, machine learning, storage, etc. 
  • It has a well-established open-source community. 
  • It allows the integration of products like Apache Beam, Kubernetes, TensorFlow and offers them as managed services. 
  • Businesses can conveniently leverage artificial intelligence in the cloud via Google Cloud’s Machine Learning Engine and multiple machine learning APIs. 
  • It simplifies container deployment and ensures effective container cluster management.
  • It offers discounted prices for long-running workloads with no up-front commitment and charges you only for the compute time you use, making it the most cost-efficient option out of the three leading providers. 
  • It supports live migrations of your virtual machines without needing to reboot them. Your VM properties don’t change during the process, making this feature a key differentiator of GCP. 

GCP, sure, does have a lot of advantages but there are certain drawbacks as well. It can offer limited services compared to AWS and Azure and offers little support for enterprise use cases. 

Microsoft Azure 

A product of Microsoft, Azure is an efficient cloud management platform that enables users to test, build, and deploy seamlessly. It offers several benefits which make it the right choice for you:

  • It offers instant backup recovery.
  • It possesses flexible core aspects with in-built integration and advanced site recovery. 
  • It offers services like autoscale, patch management, and integration to improve the performance of on-premise apps timely.
  • It offers comprehensive hybrid cloud support with its well-established Azure Stack.
  • It has multiple data centers all around the globe, making it possible to offer exceptional uptime in its service level agreement. 
  • It is highly integrated with other Microsoft products and software, making it highly cost-effective for businesses that are already leveraging other Microsoft products.
  • Microsoft offers the most comprehensive set of compliance offerings, which is its key differentiator. It has a massive team of cyber security experts that processes and analyses threat signals every day. Also, it heavily invests in security measures that make it a highly secure option for cloud migration. 

In addition to all these strong points, Microsoft Azure has certain limitations which we cannot ignore. It has fewer service offerings in comparison to AWS and is particularly suitable for enterprise customers the most. 

CONCLUSION

Comparing the pros and cons of these platforms with your requirements will help you make the right choice for your organization.