AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud: What’s your choice for enterprise?

Key strengths

Selecting one cloud vendor over the others will come down to the wants and needs of each individual customer and the workloads they are running. It is often the case that organisations will use multiple providers within different parts of their operations, or for different use cases, which is called a multi-cloud approach.

However, there are a number of key differentiating factors that separate the approaches of the three firms, which can help end users consider which is right for them.

Starting with AWS, the key strength for the market leader continues to be the breadth and depth of its services, with more than 175 across compute, storage, database, analytics, networking, mobile, developer tools, management tools, IoT, security and enterprise applications, at last count.

“Without doubt the market leader, AWS often wins on developer functionality, due to the breadth of its services as a result of its first move advantage. AWS has also done a good job at translating its scale into economic benefits for customers, although there are times where cloud can be cost prohibitive,” as McQuire at CSS Insight puts it.

Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research identifies similar strengths with the AWS proposition, but does highlight that “one challenge is pricing on AWS, where many companies don’t fully understand the metrics and the impact on architectural decisions and the costs to support certain services.”

Microsoft on the other hand tends to be a popular choice with C-level executives that have long-standing relationships with the vendor and know that they can consume a great deal of their enterprise computing needs all in one place, from productivity and enterprise software all the way down to flexible cloud computing resources for their developers, with one hand to shake.

Wang also positions Microsoft as “a strong number two to AWS”, thanks to its combination of Azure, Office 365 and Teams. “Microsoft is often seen as the safe global bet but most clients have more than one cloud vendor,” he added.

Naturally, all three vendors are strong in machine learning as they can draw on deep wells of internal research and development expertise, but this is one area where Google often stands out as customers look to tap into the magic that powered the search giant at unprecedented scale over the past couple of decades.

Google also often stands out for its deep expertise around open source technologies, especially containers, thanks to its central role in the development of Kubernetes for orchestration and the Istio service mesh, which are quickly becoming industry standard technologies.

McQuire is bullish on Google Cloud, positioning the vendor as “the market’s fiercest challenger,” under the new leadership of CEO Thomas Kurian: “What tips the scales in its favour is its engineering muscle and in particular the way customers gain access to and engage Google engineers, particularly for co-development. The firm has also heavily embraced open source and its culture of innovation lends itself to customers who prioritise these areas above all in the digital transformation.”

Wang adds: “Those organisations that seek good AI and machine learning capabilities, along with translate, search, and security have been gravitating towards Google Cloud Platform.

“The arrival of Thomas Kurian has put a product and roadmap discipline in place that aligns better with the needs of enterprises. This has opened up opportunities for more competition in the cloud duopoly of Azure and AWS.”

Features and services

At their core AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform offer largely similar basic capabilities around flexible compute, storage and networking. They all share the common elements of a public cloud: self-service and instant provisioning, autoscaling, plus security, compliance and identity management features.

All three vendors have launched services and tools targeted at cutting edge technology areas like the Internet of Things (IoT) and serverless computing (Lambda for AWS, Functions with Azure and Google), while customers can tap either cloud to variously build a mobile app or even create a high performance computing environment depending on their needs.

Machine learning has also been a booming area in the great cloud computing arms race as of late. 

AWS launched SageMaker in 2017 as a way to simplify the adoption of machine learning by bringing together a hosted environment for Jupyter notebooks with built-in model management, automated spin up of training environments using EC2 instances, and HTTPS endpoints for hosting capabilities with Amazon S3. The vendor also has a broad set of off-the-shelf machine learning services for use cases like image recognition (AWS Rekognition), text to speech deep learning models (Polly) and the engine that powers Alexa (Lex).

Microsoft’s Azure Machine Learning allows developers to write, test and deploy algorithms, as well as access a marketplace for off-the-shelf APIs.

Google offers a one-stop-shop AI platform, which helps machine learning engineers build and deploy models based on its popular open source TensorFlow deep learning library.

The recent buzz around containers is catered for as well, with all three providers offering managed services around popular container services like Kubernetes.

Finally, for UK customers worried about data sovereignty, AWS launched its UK region in December 2016, with Microsoft and Google quickly following suit.

Compute, storage, databases and networking

For compute, AWS’ main offering is its EC2 instances, which can be tailored with a large number of options. It also provides related services such as Elastic Beanstalk for app deployment, the EC2 Container service, ECS for Kubernetes (EKS), AWS Lambda and Autoscaling.

Meanwhile, Azure’s compute offering is centred around its Virtual Machines (VMs), with other tools such as Cloud Services and Resource Manager to help deploy applications on the cloud, and its Azure Autoscaling service.

Google’s scalable Compute Engine delivers VMs in Google’s data centres. They are quick to boot, come with persistent disk storage, promise consistent performance and are highly customisable depending on the needs of the customer.

All three providers support relational databases – that’s Azure SQL Database, Amazon Relational Database Service, Redshift and Google Cloud SQL – as well as NoSQL databases with Azure DocumentDB, Amazon DynamoDB and Google Bigtable.

AWS storage includes its Simple Storage (S3), Elastic Block Storage (EBS), Elastic File System (EFS), Import/Export large volume data transfer service, Glacier archive backup and Storage Gateway, which integrates with on-premise environments.

Microsoft’s offerings include its core Azure Storage service, Azure Blob block storage, as well as Table, Queue and File storage. It also offers Site Recovery, Import Export and Azure Backup.

All three typically offer excellent networking capabilities with automated server load balancing and connectivity to on-premise systems, which brings us to…

Hybrid options

One growing trend amongst the hyper-scale public cloud providers in the past year or so has been a growing focus on helping to serve customer’s hybrid and multi-cloud needs. 

This tends to apply where customers are deploying across multiple vendors’ infrastructure and also need to maintain some applications on-premise. Vendors have responded with a range of solutions to help serve these customers who aren’t ready to jump all-in on public cloud just yet, which is of course the majority of large enterprises.

Microsoft has long been the go-to option for hybrid deployments amongst the big three with its well-established Azure Stack. This provides customers with the hardware and software required to deploy Azure public cloud services from a local data centre with a shared management portal, code and APIs for simple interoperability.

AWS signalled its first serious move into hybrid deployments at its re:invent conference in 2018 with the launch of Outposts, a fully managed service where the vendor delivers pre-configured racks to your premises, where AWS services can be run as though it were in their data centre.

Google then made its own push into hybrid in 2019 with the release of Anthos, which is effectively a rebranding of the Google Cloud Services platform and brings together a combination of the existing Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), GKE On-Prem and the Anthos Config Management console. This promises unified administration, policies and security across hybrid Kubernetes deployments.

Speaking about Anthos at the Google Cloud Next conference in April 2019, new CEO Thomas Kurian said: “Many large companies truly want to train the people once on a set of technology that they can deploy anywhere. None of the other cloud providers are solving that. Today, if you talk to Azure they will say you can run Azure Stack on-premise and on the cloud, Amazon will say you can run Outposts on-premise and in the AWS cloud. They are fine companies, but they’re not solving the multi-cloud problem.”

Pricing

Pricing can be a huge attraction for those considering a move to the cloud, and with good reason: there has been a continued downward trend on prices for some time now as the big providers compete.

In general terms, prices are roughly comparable, especially since AWS shifted from by-the-hour to by-the-second pricing for its EC2 and EBS services in 2017, bringing it into line with Azure and Google.

However, making a clear comparison can be tough as all three offer slightly different pricing models, discounts and make frequent price cuts. Of course not all customers will pay the sticker price either, especially at the enterprise level where volume discounts can be negotiated with sales reps.

AWS provides a price calculator here, Microsoft here and Google here.

All vendors offer free introductory tiers, allowing customers to try their services before they buy, and typically offer credits to attract innovative startups onto their platforms as well as ‘always free’ tiers with strict usage limits.

Customers

A high-profile user base may not be the main reason for choosing your cloud provider, but it can help more cautious organisations understand how the public cloud is benefiting others in their sector.

This is clearly a strong point of AWS. It has increasingly taken on large customer deals. For example, although the US Central Intelligence Agency eventually signed a contract with IBM, it awarded AWS a contract to build its private cloud in a one-off deal in 2013, which could be seen as a symbolic moment for potential buyers.

A longstanding AWS customer is Netflix, which eventually decided to shut all of its data centres in a final move to the cloud in 2016. But aside from web pioneers, AWS has been truly successful in convincing more traditional businesses to move to the cloud.

Other major customers include: AstraZeneca, NewsCorp, AirBnB, Aon, Channel 4, Financial Times, Dow Jones, Kurt Geiger, Lonely Planet, Nasdaq, Nike, Nisa Retail, Pfizer, and the Royal Opera House. A full list of AWS customers can be seen here.

Microsoft perhaps has fewer high-profile Azure users, with most of the messaging from the vendor appearing to be around its widely used software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools. But the Redmond firm has also notched up some notable customer wins such as Pearson, Ford, NBC News and Easyjet, to name but a few.

One of Microsoft’s highest profile customer wins came late in 2019, when it sealed the hugely controversial deal for the $10 billion US Department of Defence (DoD) Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure contract – known as JEDI – which AWS continues to dispute. 

Google hasn’t quite had the same level of enterprise success thus far, but has notched up some key wins in recent years, especially when the streaming giant Spotify completed an all-in migration to GCP in the summer of 2018. UK bank HSBC has also opted for Google Cloud for its analytics and machine learning capabilities. However, HSBC is taking a clear multi-cloud approach, partnering with all three providers for different workloads.

AWS pros and cons

As mentioned before, the reasons for picking one vendor over another will differ for each customer. But there are aspects of the competing clouds that will offer benefits in certain circumstances.

The breadth and depth of the AWS offering is seen as a plus for AWS.

AWS had a head start on the competition, building out its suite of cloud services since 2006. All of these are built to be enterprise-friendly so that they will appeal to CIOs as well as its core audience of developers.

The vendor ranks highly on platform configuration options, monitoring and policy features, security and reliability. Its partner ecosystem and general product strategy are also seen as market leading, and its AWS Marketplace has a large number of third-party software services.

This is backed up by Gartner’s 2019 IaaS global Magic Quadrant, which states: “Enterprises using AWS benefit from the early adopters, which help to push new technologies into the mainstream, derisking such services and making them easier to consume and manage as a result.”

However, one area AWS falls short to some degree is with its hybrid cloud strategy, where it has tended to be dismissive of the benefits of on-premise private clouds. As outlined above, the vendor is slowly coming around to the idea though.

Another downside to AWS is the scale of its offering. While having these options to pick from is attractive, it can also be difficult navigate the large numbers of features that are on offer, and some see AWS as being a complex vendor to manage.

Despite being broadly positive about AWS as the market leading cloud provider, Gartner does highlight that certain enterprises may not want to line the pockets of Amazon, as the giant parent company continues to expand and compete in a growing array of industries, such as healthcare and financial services.

“The boards of directors for companies in potentially threatened verticals have directed their IT organisations to avoid the use of AWS where possible,” the report states. “This may ultimately limit AWS’s success in some verticals, and may impact the associated ecosystem. IT leaders in these verticals should consider a contingency plan for board-level directives.”

Microsoft Azure pros and cons

The big pull for Azure is where Microsoft already has a strong footing within an organisation and can easily play a role in helping those companies transition to the cloud. Azure naturally links well with key Microsoft on-premise systems such as Windows Server, System Center and Active Directory.

According to a survey of 100 senior IT executives by Goldman Sachs in January 2020, 56 said they preferred Azure versus 48 who opted for AWS.

“Enterprises that are strategically committed to Microsoft technology generally choose Azure as their primary IaaS+PaaS provider,” as Gartner put it in its 2019 IaaS global Magic Quadrant. “Microsoft is leveraging its tremendous sales reach and ability to co-sell Azure with other Microsoft products and services in order to drive adoption.”

Microsoft has also become increasingly open to open source technologies, with around half of its workloads now running on Linux.

One of the downsides, however, has been a series of outages over the years, including a major global outage in May 2019. Gartner analyst Lydia Leong has recommended considering disaster recovery capabilities away from Azure for critical applications hosted in the cloud. AWS isn’t immune to downtime, but suffered its last major outage in 2017, and Google Cloud last had a major outage of its own in November 2019.

Gartner also cautions: “Enterprises frequently lament the quality of Microsoft technical support (along with the increasing cost of support) and field solution architects. This negatively impacts customer satisfaction, and slows Azure adoption and therefore customer spending.”

Google Cloud Platform pros and cons

Google has a good track record with innovative cloud-native companies and has a solid standing in the open source community, but has traditionally struggled to break into the enterprise market.

As Gartner puts it, Google Cloud generally appeals to certain buyers thanks to its strengths in “big data and other analytics applications, machine learning projects, cloud-native applications, or other applications optimised for cloud-native operations.”

Its go-to-market strategy has been focused on proving itself on smaller, innovative projects at large organisations, rather than becoming a strategic cloud partner. Increasing the breadth of its partnerships and supporting pre-cloud businesses and IT processes will need to become focus areas if it wants to attract more traditional enterprises.

This is something that new CEO Thomas Kurian has clearly been keen to change since taking over in 2018.

“We have a clear vision of what we want to offer customers in a number of industries who are going through digital transformation,” he said on stage during his first Google Cloud Next conference in June 2019. “We want to give them global scale, distributed, secure infrastructure; a digital transformation platform that that helps people build innovative digital transformation solutions, and then, industry specific-capability for digital transformation in a number of industries.”

Gartner recognises these shortcomings in its 2019 Magic Quadrant: “Google demonstrates an immaturity of process and procedures when dealing with enterprise accounts, which can make the company difficult to transact with at times. This can be attributed to its nascent focus on the enterprise market. The immaturity of process is most pronounced in areas such as contract negotiation, discounting, independent software vendor (ISV) licensing, integration with enterprise systems and support.”

“Google’s overall enterprise coverage from a field sales and solutions perspective is behind its competitors. Further, enterprises often lament about Google’s inability to craft appropriate solutions for enterprise requirements when engaging with solution architects.”

That being said: “Google is aggressively targeting these shortcomings,” the analyst house added.

It is also worth noting that Google has the smallest footprint of global instances of the big three and also has no presence in one of the world’s biggest markets: China. AWS and Azure on the other hand have regions in mainland China, which are owned and operated by Chinese third-party partners Beijing Sinnet Technology, NWDC and 21Vianet, respectively.

Verdict

In very broad terms, AWS continues to lead the way in terms of offering the widest range of functionality and maturity. It continues to be the clear market leader, but the gap is closing.

Its expansive list of tools and services, along with its enterprise-friendly features make it a strong proposition for large organisations. Meanwhile its huge and continuously growing infrastructure provides economies of scale that enable aggressive price cuts.

But it appears that Microsoft has started to bridge the gap between the two, and will continue to do so with its ongoing investment in building out the Azure cloud platform and further plans to strengthen ties with its on-premise software.

For organisations already heavily invested in Microsoft in terms of technology and developer skills – of which there are undoubtedly many – Microsoft Azure will continue to be a strong proposition.

Then there is Google, which could prove a more serious enterprise competitor under its new leadership. It was already making good progress with certain customers, especially with its Kubernetes and machine learning expertise, but has much more work to do to prove itself a viable enterprise option.

Credit: Scott Carey, Computerworld