AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud

In the second post of this compare/contrast/debate series, I present the biggest cloud platforms.

You're welcome to pick your favorite and debate it out, but comments comparing the major differences are very welcome. 🙏

Comments

[Raunak Ramakrishnan]

I have used GCP and AWS so far... I favor AWS slightly over GCP.

GCP

Pros:

• Cost
• Browser SSH for quick debugging (cloud shell)
• Instant resizing of disks, memory for the compute instances
• Cloud Pub/Sub is great
• Firebase is useful for prototyping

Cons:

• Support. They need to improve this and be more customer focused.
• Reliability - There have been a few incidents where their network was down. But they have been quite stable since.

AWS

Pros:

• Reliability - The best among the major cloud provider
• Support - They understand customer pain points very well. Even their free tier support is helpful.
• Documentation - Comprehensive and generally up to date
• They have never killed any existing service. Even deprecated ones are still around though customers are discouraged from using them.

Cons:

• Cost - AWS is generally more expensive than GCP
• Calculating costs - Sometimes I feel we need a PhD in Cloud Economics to calculate AWS bill especially with Lambda, API Gateway, Cloudwatch.
• Too many services with weird names or acronyms. Keeping track of them can become cumbersome.

[Vitor Amaral]

This here "Sometimes I feel we need a PhD in Cloud Economics to calculate AWS bill " is so true. 😂

[Gwyneth Peña-Siguenza]

If you're a Windows shop: Azure > AWS > GCP.
If you want to get started learning in order to get a job: AWS > Azure > GCP. There's just more jobs and documentation on AWS than the others, though Azure is catching up quickly.
My personal favorite is Azure, the UI and support has been way better to manage than AWS. GCP UI is overcomplicated.

[Rémy 🤖]

The AWS UI feels like a cold bath of austerity and hardships but in the Azure UI you replace water with liquid nitrogen... Every time I used it I got countless errors on literally everything I did.

[e-francis]

I started with GCP,. Now Azure

[Andrew Brown 🇨🇦]

AWS > Azure > GCP

[simonhaisz]

This certainly aligns with marketshare

[Dave Jacoby]

Accepting this as the Codd's honest truth, I would like to hear more explanation about why. Capability? Complexity? Cost?

[Basti Ortiz]

Well, that was straightforward... 😂

[Joseph Friedman]

Can you elaborate?

[Filip Biterski]

I've just published an app on AWS with cloudfront distribution. What I can say is, even though many claim it's very complicated, it's surprisingly well documented. I registered a domain, uploaded files for a static site on S3, and setup a cloudfront https distribution in a day.

[Heinek Halwin]

Also the caching capabilities of the cloudfront network at their edge locations. 👌🏻

[Thai Pangsakulyanont]

I use both AWS and GCP.

On GCP I use:

• Cloud Speech-To-Text. I don’t see any competitor that gets it more accurately than Google.
• Firebase Realtime Database. I don’t see anything that’s more simple to use.
• Cloud Run. I don’t see anything like this on AWS. Tried Fargate before but the last time I tried, for a large container, it times out booting up. I don’t see any real competitor for Cloud Run yet.

On AWS I use:

• Cloud9. I like it that I can choose from a whole catalog of EC2 instance types and pay just for the EC2 price. Cloud9 auto-shutdowns the EC2 instance when unused, so an $80/mo machine ended up costing me just $20/mo. I also use Cloud9 to develop projects running on GCP. I tried Google Cloud Shell but for me it’s not a good substitute.
• Lambda. The last time I benchmarked it (by invoking simultaneously thousands compute-intensive functions) I found Lambda to be the most stable.

[Geshan Manandhar]

Cloud Run is amazing.

[Rémy 🤖]

AWS — Does everything, super complex because super complete, state of the art

GCP — Slightly simpler, full of Google-specific quirks

Azure — Ow gawd will I ever manage to create an account? How many errors 500 can a mainstream cloud provider get per second? Does anything work in there?

[Ido Shamun]

A GCP fanboy right here. Their Kubernetes as a service (GKE) is #1. I think GCP is super under rated if you look at the cost and the services that you get. Also their dashboard is pretty straightforward compared to AWS and Azure where I can never navigate properly.

[Vitor Amaral]

You're right the GCP dashboard is the most simple and organized, but Azure is not far away, AWS is a mess

[e-francis]

Can't agree less

[Sean Allin Newell]

👏 Let's 👏 go 👏 multi 👏 cloud 👏.

[Tatiana Barrios]

Hi all!

I would say AWS > GCP

Favorite thing from AWS: Lambda, S3 + Cloudfront. There you can get a web app up and running in less than a day.
Favorite thing from GCP: Shell console and Kubernetes :)

I hate from AWS: Pricing... ugh
I hate from GCP: The UI is kind of complicated, it's like they are stashing a lot of stuff in little space.

I have never used Azure, even though I'm open to <3

[Brian McBride]

I'm late to the conversation here.
The GCP FIrebase tools gives you a web app that offers WAY more features (like auto certs, HTTP2, etc...) and you can have a deployment going in about 15 minutes.

Seriously, check out the Firebase CLI tools. Just create a project with hosting and cloud functions and you have a simpler version of Lambda/S3/Cloudfront. HUGELY easier.

In the end, they both work. And Cloudfront has some better rules for things like IP filtering.

Last, I guess if you are used to AWS you might find it easier. I work with both daily, so I am used to both. GCP is sooooo much better in the UI. They also have APIs for everything and the GCLOUD command tool has full coverage. Someone new to the cloud providers, GCP is super easy.

[Calvin Chong]

Agree with UI AWS > GCP, both navigation is mess but GCP make it worst. I use search which is much faster to locate what I want, AWS search result is straightforward

[Wernich ️]

azure is by far the best one i've used so far*

*i've only used azure. :D

we use azure devops at work for source control with git and last week i decided to give the extra bits a whirl, so now i'm busy reading up on pipelines and deployment and so on (having tons of fun with their learning paths). also, i committed to doing a showcase this friday about using azure pipelines to build and deploy a docker container when a PR succeeds...

[Andrew Vitale]

Nice! Similar situation here. My company has a Visual Studio Pro account for each dev, which comes with $50 worth of monthly credit in addition to the DevOps pipelines/artifacts. Just started playing around with Blob Storage and their CDN. It's quite nice, but I do prefer AWS a little bit. First love, I guess 😍