Amazon, Microsoft or Google: which cloud provider to go with?

Gartner typically divides it into four segments: Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries, and Niche Players. In this year’s report, there are no Challengers listed. We’ll skip Niche players and Visionaries, since they don’t serve the broadest range of use cases, and focus on the Leaders who have a significant market share, and a sizeable base of reputable customers. The Leaders haven’t changed since 2021, these are Amazon Web Service (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Let’s have a quick look at each giant.

Amazon Web Services is a subsidiary of amazon.com, which provides an on-demand cloud computing platform to individuals, companies, and governments on a paid-subscription basis.

Amazon Web Services is the most experienced player in the cloud market. AWS was publicly launched in 2006, and as one of the oldest cloud providers, it has established a bigger user base, as well as a bigger trust and reliability score.

Companies choose to build their applications on AWS because of its breadth and depth of services. A plethora of tools, including databases, analytics, management, IoT, security, and enterprise applications, make AWS the right solution for many teams. No wonder AWS has the most significant slice of the cloud market.

Microsoft Azure, initially called Azure, was launched in 2010 with the intent to provide a competent cloud computing platform for businesses. Microsoft Azure closely competes with AWS by means of versatility of services and pricing.

Businesses which use Microsoft software naturally adopt its cloud services, and these are mostly enterprises, this is how Azure quickly acquired a significant market share of 17%. It is however twice as lower as AWS.

Google Cloud Platform began its journey in 2011, and in less than a decade it has managed to create a good presence in the cloud industry. The initial intent of Google Cloud was to strengthen Google’s own products such as Google Search engine and YouTube. But now, they have also introduced their enterprise services so that anyone can use Google Cloud Platform which shares the same infrastructure as that of Google Search or YouTube.

So, which provider to choose: Amazon, Microsoft or Google?

All of the Big Three providers are well-established and trusted by famous brands, all are offering scalable, elastic resources, delivered in near real-time. We could compare pricing models, availability zones or some key services, but the differences are too minor to hold your attention or make a decision on your cloud computing strategy.

Well, why do we and another 30% of cloud computing users choose AWS?

We prefer AWS because it is the most mature, and provides the widest variety of services and more computing capacity than Microsoft and Google. Microsoft is hot on the heels of AWS by means of its variety of services, but it has a strong emphasis on the enterprise and rarely can fit the needs of a start-up. Google continues to evolve, yet it provides significantly limited services compared to AWS and Azure.

Sometimes we choose DigitalOcean over AWS. Why? DigitalOcean is generally considered to be more affordable than AWS, especially for users who are just starting out or don't need the full range of AWS services. DigitalOcean also offers a simple, pay-as-you-go pricing model, which can be more flexible and easier to understand than the more complex pricing structure of AWS.

The quantity of AWS services can be overwhelming, yet there is a bunch of universal tools we use almost for each project. Let’s dip the toe into each so you could taste some possibilities of the AWS infrastructure.

With EC2, you can launch virtual machines (also known as instances) on demand, and select from a variety of instance types and configurations to suit your needs. This allows businesses and projects to easily scale their computing resources up or down as needed, without the need to invest in physical hardware.

EC2 allows you to pay only for the capacity that you use, so you can save money on computing resources when they are not needed. It is also highly configurable and can be used for a wide variety of applications, including web and application hosting, data processing, and scientific computing.

Businesses and projects that need flexible, scalable computing resources can benefit from using EC2. This includes companies that need to quickly scale their computing resources to handle increases in traffic, as well as those that need to run large-scale, compute-intensive applications such as data analytics and machine learning.

It works by allowing you to upload your code to the AWS Lambda service, which then takes care of running the code for you. You only need to pay for the computing time that your code consumes.

AWS Lambda can be used for a wide variety of projects and businesses. For example, it can be used for creating microservices, automating ETL (extract, transform, load) processes, and building serverless applications. Some businesses and projects that can benefit from using AWS Lambda include those that need to process large amounts of data, those that need to run code in response to events (such as new data being added to a database), and those that need to run code in a scalable and cost-effective way.

RDS works by allowing you to create a database instance and choose from a range of database engines (such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Microsoft SQL Server) to run on that instance. RDS then takes care of the underlying infrastructure (such as the servers and storage) and provides features such as automatic backups, point-in-time recovery, and scaling.

Businesses can benefit from using AWS RDS in several ways. First, it allows them to quickly and easily set up and operate a relational database in the cloud, without having to worry about managing the underlying infrastructure. This can save time and effort, and reduce the complexity of managing a database.

Second, RDS provides features such as automatic backups and scaling, which can help to improve the reliability and performance of the database. Finally, RDS allows businesses to pay for the compute and storage resources that they use, which can help to reduce costs compared to running a database on-premises.

It simply allows you to route users to Internet applications by translating human-readable names (such as www.example.com) into numeric IP addresses (such as 192.0.2.1).

Route 53 works by allowing you to create DNS records for your domain, which specify the IP addresses that your domain name should resolve to. You can create different types of DNS records, such as A records (which map a domain name to an IP address), MX records (which specify the mail servers for a domain), and CNAME records (which specify an alias for a domain name).

Once you have created your DNS records, Route 53 automatically responds to DNS queries for your domain name and routes users to the correct IP address. Route 53 also provides features such as health checking, which allows you to monitor the availability of your application, and routing policies, which allow you to specify how traffic should be routed to your application.

Overall, Route 53 allows you to easily manage the routing of traffic to your Internet applications, and provides a reliable and scalable DNS service.

S3 works by allowing you to create "buckets" where you can store your data. Each bucket can store an unlimited amount of data, and you can have as many buckets as you need. You can then upload your data to a bucket, and S3 automatically stores the data across multiple servers in a highly available and durable manner.

S3 provides a number of features that make it a useful storage service for a wide range of projects. For example, it allows you to store any amount of data, it automatically scales to meet the demands of your application, and it provides features such as versioning and lifecycle management to help you manage your data. Additionally, S3 is designed to be highly secure, with features such as encryption and access control to help you keep your data safe.

<p>Some projects that can benefit from using AWS S3 include those that need to store large amounts of data, those that need to store data in a scalable and cost-effective manner, and those that require a high level of security for their data.</p>