Google Cloud vs AWS: Difference Between Google Cloud & AWS

Globally, the cloud computing market is dominated by three giants – Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS. Today, we’re going to pit Google Cloud and AWS to get a neck-to-neck comparison of these two cloud computing platforms. 

Google Cloud vs. AWS

What is Google Cloud?

Google Cloud is a suite of cloud computing services offered by Google. It is an assortment of various physical assets like computers and hard disk drives and virtual resources like virtual machines (VMs), contained in Google’s data centers across the world. These assets run on the same infrastructure that powers Google end-user products, including Google Search, Gmail, and YouTube. 

Google Cloud offers IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and serverless computing environments for covering all enterprise storage and computing requirements. It offers a host of modular cloud services such as cloud computing, machine learning, data storage, and data analytics.

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What is AWS?

AWS is a leading, on-demand cloud platform that offers more than 175 featured services hosted from data centers worldwide. It includes IaaS, PaaS, and also SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions. AWS is a comprehensive cloud framework because it offers a host of solutions like storage, analytics, networking, data migration, development tools, enterprise applications, etc. – all rolled into a flexible, scalable, and cost-effective model. You can use AWS products as per the pay-as-you-go model, meaning you only pay for the services you use. 

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AWS boasts of having a massive and dynamic community. Not only is it secure, but it also allows you to utilize the latest technologies to power innovation. 

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Why AWS?

Some of the reasons why companies should be using AWS are as follows:

1. AWS offers infinite scalability, enabling organizations to adjust their resource allocation to meet demands.
2. AWS also provides services that seamlessly duplicate data across many sites for increased reliability, including Amazon S3 for storage space and Amazon RDS for database records.
3. Additionally, AWS offers services and tools for cost management, allowing companies to keep tabs on and handle their expenses. Organizations that scale services up or down can reduce expenses by adapting their infrastructure to meet requirements.
4. AWS provides a wide range of cloud-based services, such as storage, computing, database systems, networking purposes, machine learning, analytics, and more. This way, companies will be able to develop, deploy, and manage all of their applications and programs entirely via the AWS platform, eliminating the need for numerous third-party service providers.
5. The computing infrastructure offered by AWS is adaptable and customized, supporting a wide range of operating system versions, coding languages, and software designs. It is compatible with both the Windows and Linux operating systems and with numerous programming languages and coding platforms.
6. AWS has taken thorough precautions to protect your applications and their contents. It offers encryption solutions, access and identity administration resources, network security functions, and certifications for compliance to assuring the privacy and security of consumer data.

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Why Google Cloud?

Here are some of the reasons why companies should use Google Cloud services:

1. With the elastic scaling capabilities offered by Google Cloud, businesses can effortlessly supply and assign processing power, storage facilities, and numerous other tools to meet their particular demands, leading to optimal efficiency and usage of resources.
2. The network infrastructure of Google Cloud offers a large bandwidth capacity, ensuring quick and dependable connectivity for data retrieval and transmission.
3. Google Cloud offers an extensive worldwide chain of data centres spread across many locations. This network allows organizations to set up their applications and services nearby to their users, decreasing delays and enhancing performance.
4. Google Cloud offers robust machine learning and analytics features. Businesses may use tools such as BigQuery, Dataflow, and AI Platform to analyze huge quantities of data, gain insights, and create smart applications.
5. Google Cloud is dedicated to offering strong security measures that protect client information and applications. It uses cutting-edge security techniques and industry-standard procedures to protect user access, infrastructures and data.
6. If we compare Google cloud vs AWS pricing, Google Cloud offers open and adaptable price choices, such as committed usage contracts, regular usage discounts, and cost control tools. The pricing and invoicing structure of Google Cloud helps businesses to manage their cloud computing expenses efficiently and at reduced costs.
7. When compared between Google Cloud vs AWS Cloud, Google Cloud works smoothly with other prominent Google services, like Google Workspace, Google Maps, and Google AI. By combining Google Cloud with these tools, companies can improve communication and create location-based applications while making use of Google’s cutting-edge AI technology.

Google Cloud vs. AWS: The key differences between Google Cloud vs. AWS

Let’s take a look at the most fundamental differences between Google Cloud vs. AWS:

Features and offerings

As mentioned before, AWS has over 175 cloud services, whereas GCP offers around 50 featured cloud services. Naturally, AWS is more feature-rich than GCP and includes several additional services designed for large enterprises with growing computing needs. However, it must be noted that Google Cloud includes all the core cloud services that can cater to standard business use cases. Also, it offers more flexibility in terms of the personalization of services, something that is pretty limited in AWS.

Market share

According to the Q2 2020 research from Synergy Research Group, the cloud market is mostly dominated by AWS, followed by Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). While AWS bags a whopping 33% of the cloud market share, GCP accounts for 9% of the cloud market.

Pricing

Although Google Cloud’s core cloud offerings are similar to those offered by AWS, their pricing varies significantly when it comes to the pricing. While Google Cloud has three pricing plans – Silver, Gold, and Platinum, AWS offers four pricing plans – Basic, Developer, Business, and Enterprise.

GCP offers attractive pricing provides to its customers via its Committed Use and Sustained Use Discounts. This GCP scheme provides sustained price advantages over AWS to users who have been using Google Cloud services for a long time. Contrary to this, AWS requires users to incur upfront costs of reserving its services for one or three years. 

Uptime

Google Compute Engine and AWS EC2 both include SLAs (service-level agreement) that usually offers an impressive monthly uptime percentage of 99.95%. However, AWS has the upper hand on the uptime front because it allows you to access the potential of different machines within their multiple availability zones per region.

Unlike this, Google Cloud generally runs your instances on a specific machine per region. But then, Google Cloud facilitates live migration through virtual machines (VMs). Live migration enables Google developers/engineers to address common issues like software updates, patching and repairing.

Also Read: AWS v/s Google v/s Azure: Who will win the Cloud War?

Disadvantages 

When we are discussing Google Cloud vs AWS, both services have several benefits, but there are certain disadvantages, too, such as the following:

1. AWS imposes default limitations on resources that vary by location.
2. When using AWS, your application experiences hardware-level modifications that cannot provide the optimum performance or utilization of your applications.
3. AWS has a broad range of resources and functions, which can make it confusing for customers, particularly those who are newcomers to cloud computing.
4. Your applications may take longer to process because of the Google Cloud Platform’s often delayed response time.
5. The cost of using Google Cloud is one of its drawbacks. The cost of retrieving data from Google Cloud Storage is hefty.
6. Google Cloud depends on a worldwide network of information centres that provide the computing capacity for the services it provides. As a result, it may experience delays or other reliability challenges if it encounters an issue with any of Google’s data centres.

Wrapping up

There’s no clear winner here – both Google Cloud and AWS are excellent cloud platforms with distinct pros and cons. While AWS seems like the ideal choice for large enterprises and MNCs with an international presence, Google Cloud offers excellent core cloud services with flexible pricing. 

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