Benefits Of Google Cloud Platform: How Gcp Differs From Aws And Azure

Benefits of Google Cloud Platform: How GCP Differs from AWS and Azure

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) sometimes seems like the 3rd wheel amongst the Biggest 3 public cloud providers. It has made a smaller splash in the public cloud computing space than its two biggest competitors, Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, which dwarf GCP in cloud market share, and it was barely a contender for the JEDI contract.

Yet Google Cloud Platform is growing faster than Azure and AWS. It needs to have something working for it that these different cloud providers don’t. Let’s estimate out what that is by looking at five things that differentiate GCP from AWS and Azure and how tactics and strategy may shape the public cloud computing landscape going forward of GCP.

AWS, Azure, and GCP: Feature-wise Comparison

Features

AWS

Azure

GCP

Computer Services	AWS Beanstalk Amazon EC2 Amazon EC2 Auto-Scaling Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service Amazon Lightsail Amazon Elastic Container Registry VMware Cloud for AWS AWS Serverless Application Repository AWS Batch AWS Lambda AWS Fargate Elastic Load Balancing AWS Outposts	Function-as-a-service (FaaS) Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) Azure Batch Service Fabric Container Instances Batch Cloud Services Azure Container Service (AKS) Virtual Machine Scale Sets Virtual Machines Compute Engine	Docker Container Registry App Engine Compute Engine Instant Groups Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) Knative Functions Kubernetes
AI/ML	SageMaker Lex Polly Comprehend Rekognition Machine Learning Deep Learning AMIs Transcribe Translate DeepLens TensorFlow on AWS Apache MXNet on AWS	Azure Bot Service Machine Learning Cognitive Services	Dialogflow Enterprise Edition Cloud Machine Learning Engine Cloud Speech API Cloud Natural Language Cloud Translation API Cloud Job Discovery (Private Beta) Cloud Video Intelligence
Storage Services	Elastic Block Storage (EBS) Simple Storage Service (S3) Storage Gateway Elastic File System (EFS) Snowball Edge Snowball Snowmobile	Queue Storage Blob Storage File Storage Data Lake Store Disk Storage	Cloud Storage Transfer Appliance Persistent Disk Transfer Service
Database Services	RDS Aurora ElastiCache DynamoDB Neptune Redshift Database Migration Service	Database for MySQL SQL Database Data Warehouse Database for PostgreSQL Cosmos DB Table Server Stretch Database Storage Data Factory Redis Cache	Cloud SQL Cloud Spanner Cloud Bigtable Cloud Datastore
Serverless computing	Serverless Application Repository Lambda	Functions	Google Cloud Functions
Backup Services	Glacier	Archive Storage Site Recovery Backup	Coldline (infrequently accessed data) Nearline (frequently accessed data)
Caching	Elastic Cache	Redis Cache	Cloud CDN
Strengths	Extensive, mature offerings Dominant market position Global reach Support for large organizations Flexibility and a wider range of service	Integration with Microsoft tools and software Second largest provider Broad feature set Support for open source Hybrid cloud Ideal for startups and developers	Designed for cloud-native businesses Commitment to open source and portability Flexible contracts DevOps expertise Complete container-based model Most cost-efficient
File Storage	EFS	Azure Files	ZFS and Avere
Security	AWS Security Hub	Azure Security Center	Cloud Security Command Center
Networking	Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)	Azure Virtual Network (VNET)	Cloud Virtual Network
Location	77 availability zones within 24 geographic regions	Presence in 60+ regions across the world	Presence in 24 regions and 73 zones. Available in 200+ countries and territories
DNS Services	Amazon Route 53	Azure Traffic Manager	Cloud DNS
Documentation	Best in class	High quality	High quality
Notifications	Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)	Azure Notification Hub	None
Load Balancing	Elastic Load Balancing	Load Balancing for Azure	Cloud Load Balancing
Compliance	AWS CloudHSM	Azure Trust Center	Google Cloud Platform Security
Automation	AWS Opsworks	Azure Automation	Compute Engine Management

Several differentiators help in explaining the growing market share of GCP relative to Azure and AWS. Some reflect actual mechanical differences between Google Cloud Platform and their competitors. Others are rooted in observed differences that may not be prostrated in actuality, but the distinction doesn’t always matter for companies vying to compare public cloud providers in an extremely complex landscape.