CHOOSING: AWS, AZURE, AND GCP – WHAT’S BEST FOR YOUR STARTUP

So The biggest challenge for any company is to keep their data safe and accessible at the same time. Keeping this in mind we have done a comprehensive analysis for you between the three biggest players in the cloud computing market- AWS, Azure, and GCP so as to help you in making an informed choice.

Azure, AWS, and GCP have their own strengths and weaknesses that make them ideal for different use cases. Let’s take a look at each one of them and how they stand against each other.

Migrating to cloud, is the simplest way to innovate and deploy new competitive services. Besides that, it offers great flexibility with scalability. All three cloud computing vendors are strong contenders for businesses. However, the key is to understand that the various tech strengths and backgrounds have molded the approach of these companies to deliver cloud solutions.

Startup offers
The cloud service providers understand that if they target startups and once they grow big then they will most likely stay with the provider thus bringing them good revenue. This is the reason why each of them offers specific plans for startups.

AWS – Amazon offers two self-starter packs which are free for the first year along with some web-based training. The portfolio packages are included in AWS activate for startup program which is more generous. To qualify for this, a startup must be in the selected incubator/ accelerator or be related to specific venture capital funds.

Azure– In 2018, Microsoft has revamped its offerings for startups. Startups can now get $200 credits for 30 days along with regular free tier service for one year. Besides that, Microsoft promises to provide sales and marketing resources for selling your product.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP)– Google has one of the best offerings for new startups. GCP has three options which give credits of $3000, $20,000, $100,000 for one year under 3 different packages.

So, all three cloud providers offer around $100,000 to the best startups via referrals from incubators and accelerators

Now let’s take a look at the overall pros and cons of these three cloud service providers.

AWS
The biggest strength of Amazon is its dominance in the cloud market and the reason for its popularity is the massive scope of its operations. AWS offers a wide variety of services along with the most comprehensive network of global datacenters.

The pricing is based on the amount of use and scaling is easy and can support an unlimited number of users. Besides that, there is a lot of customization, flexibility, and support for third-party integrations. Furthermore, Big Data solutions and real-time analytics are available along with a set of cloud-based disaster recovery services.

However, the biggest disadvantage of AWS is its cost. Many enterprises find it difficult to understand and manage the cost structure of AWS effectively when running a high volume of workload. So for a startup company the difficulty level increases since they have limited resources.

Overall, the cons of Amazon can be overlooked considering its strengths and companies of all sizes continue to use it for a wide range of workload.

Azure
Microsoft repurposed its on-premise software-Office SQL, Windows Server, Sharepoint, .Net, Dynamics Active Directory for the cloud. One of the biggest reason for its success is that most of the enterprises deploy Windows and other Microsoft software. Since Azure is strongly integrated with these applications, startups that use Microsoft software often will find it convenient.

The setup is easy and there is a variety of price offerings and the biggest strength is its speed. The downside of Azure is the service experience, customer issues with technical support, training, documentation has been often cited.

GCP
Since the time Google developed Kubernetes standard it has a strong offering in containers. Google Cloud Platform specializes in high compute offerings in machine learning and big data analytics. Besides, that GCP offers considerable load balancing and scale.

GCP integrates easily with other services and highly-discounted prices are offered for long-term contracts. Moreover, when compared to AWS and Azure, GCP is the cheapest provider in terms of computing power both in reserved and on-demand instances. Both AWS and Google continue to tweak their systems to ensure applications are easy to configure and launch. However, GCP has an edge since
their systems can be deployed on all types of systems without worrying about the compatibility issues.

The downside is that GCP is often chosen as the secondary provider, however, it is now being progressively chosen as a strategic alternative to Amazon.

Conclusion
It’s is a serious business choice to choose between these three cloud service providers. Nobody can say which provider wins the battle. AWS always had a huge market share, though Azure and GCP continue to close the gap.