AWS VS AZURE VS GCP: COMPARING THE BIG 3 CLOUD
PLATFORMS
Cloud computing has revolutionized the way organizations work, and advancing us to a new
technology era. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform are the top
cloud service providers that dominate the worldwide cloud market.
Nowadays, most enterprises are moving towards the cloud and even multi-cloud environments to
harness the benefits offered by cloud computing, such as:
Decreased CapEx
Reduced infrastructure maintenance
Increased availability
Scalability
Of course, the Big 3 cloud providers possess the experience and expertise to provide a reliable and
feature-rich cloud platform. But, before committing to a specific cloud platform, you must do your
due diligence and compare each platform to fully understand their capabilities and differences.
In this post, we will see how these platforms stack up against the others.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
The current market leader of the cloud computing platforms, Amazon Web Services is a subsidiary
of Amazon.com, Inc. AWS is the most mature cloud platform offering a wide range of services to
practically everyone: individual developers, large enterprises, and even governments.
AWS started its life as an internal cloud offering. By 2006, it had evolved into a publicly available
cloud platform with services like Amazon S3 cloud storage and elastic compute cloud (EC2). AWS
now offers more than 200 fully featured services to cater to any demand and serve millions of users.
Prominent AWS customers include:
Expedia
Netflix
Coinbase
Formula 1
Coca Cola
Intuit
Airbnb
Lyft
Coursera
Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
(Explore our AWS Guide, a series of articles & tutorials.)
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure is the second-largest cloud platform. Debuting in 2010, Azure has evolved into a
cloud platform with more than 200 products and services. Today, it is among the fastest-growing
cloud platforms.
As Microsoft offers Azure, it provides a wide array of services tailored particularly for Microsoft-
centric enterprises—making the switch to a cloud or a hybrid-cloud environment smooth for many
organizations. In use by more than 95% of Fortune 500 companies, Microsoft Azure has a proven
track record in catering to enterprise users.
Importantly, Azure is not limited to Windows-based services. It also supports open-source
languages, technologies, and platforms, giving anyone the freedom to build and support any
application.
Well-known Azure customers include:
DAIMLER AG
McKesson Group
Asos
Center of Disease Control (CDC) - US
National Health Service (NHS) - UK
HSBC
Starbucks
Walgreens
3M
HP
Mitsubishi Electric
Renault
(Explore popular Azure certifications.)
Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
The Google Cloud Platform is the cloud offering by none other than Google. GCP is part of the
overarching Google Cloud.
Available to the general public beginning in 2010, the Google Cloud Platform currently offers over
100 services spanning computing, networking, big data, and more. Today GCP consists of services
including Google Workspace, enterprise Android, and Chrome OS.
Compared to AWS and Azure, GCP is the smallest of the Big 3 cloud providers. Yet it offers a robust
set of cloud services to power and support any kind of application.
Notable GCP customers include:
Toyota
Unilever
Nintendo
Spotify
The Home Depot
Target
Twitter
Paypal
UPS
How to choose a cloud service provider
There are many factors to consider when choosing a CSP. Let’s take a look at the most common
angles.
Regions and availability
When choosing a cloud provider, the first thing to consider is its supported regions and availability.
These directly impact the performance of your cloud, due to factors like latency and compliance
requirements, especially when dealing with data.
As of September 2021, here’s where the Big 3 stand:
Amazon Web Service has 25 geographic regions with 81 availability zones. 218+ edge locations,
and 12 Regional Edge Caches.
Microsoft Azure runs 60+ regions with a minimum of three availability zones in each region
with more than 116 edge locations (Points of Presence).
Google Cloud Platform has 27 cloud regions with 82 zones and 146 edge locations.
All these platforms provide specialized cloud solutions for the government (Government Cloud).
Furthermore, both AWS and Azure offer specialized services that cater to the Chinese market with
data centers located in China.
Azure has the broadest geographic coverage compared to the others, while all platforms cover
most of the globe. And, showing no signs of slowing, all providers continuously expand their
coverage by adding more regions and zones to meet the ever-increasing computing demand.
(Get an in-depth look at the Big 3 regions & availability.)
Common services
AWS and Azure have the largest service catalogs by offering more than 200+ services. GCP currently
offers around 100+ services. A general breakdown of services is:
1. AWS has the largest catalog of services.
2. Azure is a close second with an impressive set of AI, ML, and analytics services.
3. Google Cloud Platform comes in third place for the number of services offered.
In this section, let’s take a look at the common service offerings of each cloud platform.
Compute Services
Service AWS Azure GCP
VM (Compute Azure Virtual Google Compute
EC2 (Elastic Compute)
Instance) Machine Engine
PaaS AWS Elastic Beanstalk App Service Google App Engine
AWS Elastic Azure Kubernetes Google Kubernetes
Container
Container/Kubernetes Service Service (AKS) Engine
Serverless Google Cloud
AWS Lambda Azure Function
Functions Functions
Database & Storage Services
Service AWS Azure GCP
RDBMS (Multiple Database Azure SQL/ Database for
AWS RDS Cloud SQL
Types - SQL, MySQL, etc..) MySQL/PostgreSQL
DynamoDB, Simple Azure Cosmos DB, Table BigTable, Cloud
NoSQL
DB Storage Datastore
S3 (Simple Storage Google Cloud
Object Storage Blob Storage
Service) Storage
File Storage Elastic File System Azure File Storage Google Filestore
Google Storage
Archive Storage Amazon Glacier Azure Archive Storage
(Archive Storage)
Data Warehouse/Data
Amazon Redshift Azure Synapse Analytics Google BigQuery
Lake
Networking
Service AWS Azure GCP
Virtual Network Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Virtual Network (Vnet) Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
Google Cloud Load
Load Balancing Elastic Load Balancer Azure Load Balancer
Balancing
AWS Firewall / Web
Firewall Azure Firewall Google Cloud firewalls
Application Firewall
DNS Route 53 Azure DNS Google Cloud DNS
Azure Content Delivery
CDN Amazon CloudFront Cloud CDN
Network (CDN)
As you can see, all three providers offer comparable services to cover the common computing
needs of users. However, there are basic differences in two general categories:
How each service is implemented in its cloud platform
The individual features available for each service
Specialized services
When it comes to specialized services, we notice significant differences in the services available
with AWS and Azure, far surpassing GCP.
Service AWS Azure GCP
GCP DevOps
CodePipeline, CodeBuild, Azure Boards, Pipelines, Repos,
DevOps CloudBuild,
CodeDeploy, CodeStar Test Plans, Artifacts
Artifact Registry
Amazon SageMaker, Azure Machine Learning, Azure Vertex AI,
Amazon Comprehend, Databricks, Azure Cognitive AutoML, Dataflow
AI & ML
Amazon Lex, Amazon Search, Azure Bot Service, CX, Cloud Vision,
Polly Cognitive Services Virtual Agents
FreeRTOS, IoT Core,
Azure IoT Hub/Central, IoT Edge, Google Cloud IoT
IoT Greengrass, IoT Analytics,
Azure Sphere, Azure RTOS Core
SiteWise
Azure Mixed Reality (Spatial
AR & VR Amazon Sumerian ARCore
Anchors/Remote Rendering)
Game
Amazon GameLift Azure PlayFab
Development
Business Analytics Amazon Quicksight Azure Power BI Looker
End-User
Amazon Workspaces Azure Virtual Desktop
Computing
Robotics AWS RoboMaker
These are only some of the specialized services available with these platforms—AWS users can
even dabble with quantum computing using Amazon Braket!
Pricing
The pricing of the cloud platform depends on many factors:
Customer requirements
Usage
The services used
All three platforms offer competitive pricing plans with additional cost management
options—reserved instances, budgets, and resource optimization—available to all users.
The consensus in the IT community is that Microsoft Azure has the lowest on-demand pricing while
Amazon tends to come somewhere around the middle. However, there is a clear advantage when
enterprise customers already using Microsoft services (Windows, active directory, MS SQL, etc.)
move to Azure as it is significantly cheaper than other cloud providers.
AWS vs Azure vs GCP: pros & cons
AWS
Pros Cons
• Most services available, from networking to
robotics
• Most mature • Dev/Enterprise support must be purchased
• Considered the gold standard in cloud reliability • Can overwhelm newcomers with the sheer
and security number of services and options
• More compute capacity vs Azure & GCP • Comparatively limited options for hybrid cloud
• All major software vendors make their programs
available on AWS
Microsoft Azure
Pros Cons
• Easy integration and migrations for existing
Microsoft services
• Many services available, including best-in-class • Fewer service offerings vs AWS
AI, ML, and analytics services • Particularly geared towards enterprise
• Relatively cheaper for most services vs AWS & customers
GCP
• Great support for hybrid cloud strategies
GCP
Pros Cons
• Plays nicely with other Google service and
products • Limited services vs AWS & Azure
• Excellent support for containerized workloads • Limited support for enterprise use cases
• Global fiber network
Summing up the Big 3
Even though AWS is the current market leader in terms of capacity and service, Microsoft and
Google are also rapidly growing to compete with AWS.
Microsoft in particular is hot on the heels of AWS with its strong emphasis on the enterprise.
Meanwhile, Google continues to evolve its presence by providing excellent integrations with open-
source projects and third-party services.
In the end, of course, it all boils down to your specific use case. As the market grows, most
enterprises are looking for multi-cloud strategies to leverage the strengths offered by each cloud
provider without locking themselves to a single provider.
Related reading
BMC Multi-Cloud Blog
The State of SaaS: Growth Trends & Statistics
AWS ECS vs AWS Lambda: What’s The Difference & How To Choose
Cloud Governance Best Practices for Efficient Cloud Operations
Common Roles in Cloud Computing
Cloud Growth, Trends & Outlook
