Cloud Wars 2019: AWS vs Azure vs Google

The world of Cloud is dominated by three providers: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. There is a consistent war for leadership and dominance going on between these three companies. No doubt, the clear leader among these three is Amazon, closely followed by Microsoft with Google coming behind. The reason for the war is very clear: the technological world has moved from the consideration of leveraging Cloud technology. It is now more of choices to make among the available providers.

To tell the truth, each of the Cloud providers has its own benefits for the different kinds of users. In this blog article, we will explore these three platforms and their differentiating factors. Let’s dive into them right now!

Market Share: AWS, Azure, and Google

AWS has remained the leader in terms of its market share. According to results of the quarterly sales of Amazon, AWS had about $25.7 billion USD in 2018, which is the biggest figure among the Cloud providers. In addition to this, it has declared 47% annual growth of its market share. Well, this should not be a big surprise bearing in mind that the company had a 7-year head start before its competitors – Microsoft and Google – waded into the public Cloud space.

As for Azure, Microsoft declared its commercial Cloud revenue that is $23 billion USD. This value covers the revenue of different Cloud properties. No doubt, this figure is deceptive because it gives a false indication that Azure is almost at par with AWS. However, it has been bundled together with Office 365 in its financial report. According to analysts, the actual revenue of Azure should be about $13.8 billion USD, which indicates a huge 82% annual growth. Even with this figure, Azure is still well behind AWS when it comes to its market share of 13.7%. In spite of the huge difference, Azure still maintains its second place for the highest market share holder in the Cloud commerce.

Google has not yet announced its Cloud revenue for 2018, but according to analysts, the estimate of Google’s Cloud revenue will be about $6.8 billion USD. This represents an annual growth of about 94%, which gives Google the spot for the third biggest market share.

Pricing Comparison: AWS, Azure, and Google

Looking at this from the point of view of the regular user, all Cloud providers are offering the same thing, which includes the Cloud platform and Cloud services. Although this is the truth, but it’s not as simple as it sounds. Looking at it solely from the view of computer services offered by these three companies, the prices may look a bit simple with the general computing services of pay-as-you-go ranging from $0.05 to $0.09 among the three ones. However, it’s more complicated than this. There are different options of computing with different cost and use. For instance, AWS offers about ten operating systems and over one hundred and fifty instance types. The same numbers hold for Azure. Due to the variety of differences, it is hard to reasonably compare the costs of these providers. To make an informed decision between these three ones based on their price, you will have to check their websites and use the calculator on the sites to get an estimate of their monthly cost.

Feature Comparison: AWS, Azure, and Google

These three Cloud providers have basically the same top level features. They have storage, compute, as well as other services. Now, other service, which is the third category of offering, has the biggest prospect for brand differentiation. If all you need from any of these three vendors is to just host a basic website or an app, then you don’t have much issue and you only have to consider the cost. However, if you want to add other services to your list of needs from any of these three providers, you might have to do a bit more than considering costs alone. Let’s look at the most distinguishing feature of AWS, Azure, and Google.

AWS offers a wide range of services, which happen to be its strength as well as its biggest weakness. The Cloud platform is always coming up with new service innovations that it is sometimes hard for businesses to keep up with the number and relevance of the services to their (customer) enterprise. The wide portfolio of services makes it hard to understand and manage the cost.

On the other hand, Azure doesn’t have such a rich portfolio of services, but it is also churning out new services. There are about 154 Azure services offered by Microsoft, which range from Bing Custom Search to a wide variety of mixed reality apps. In terms of feature, Azure seems to be ahead of the pack and not really because of its services: it is more of inter-operability. AWS is focused on public Cloud computing while Azure is concentrated on the customers who require interoperability with their personal data centers. In other words, Azure provides a hybrid Cloud option for its users.

Google has always occupied the position of a pioneer and this reputation has remained consistent, even with its Cloud platform. The biggest strength of the Google Cloud platform is its innovative abilities. With specialization in machine learning, containerization, analytics, and Big Data, Google seems to be ahead as far as IT focused services are concerned.

Summary

In addition to these three different areas that this blog article focuses on, there are other fields where these Cloud giants have continued to compete strongly. The war for dominance in the service offerings to business enterprises, startups, and the government goes ahead. Each has different offerings for each segment of their customers and they are always seeking new ways to outdo each other on different levels. When it comes to choosing the best Cloud platform, the first thing you should do is to identify your needs and the provider that has the perfect solutions to meet them.