Over a couple of years now, the results in the great cloud race have been pretty consistent: AWS continues to dominate the entire thing, coming first, with Microsoft Azure gaining but its still much behind in seconds, and GCP pulling up the rear in thirds.
And when we start to think of a link between GCP and AWS the very first thing that could pop into the mind of a lot of people is, “Why?
Why. AWS has prevailed, so no one knows how it can shake off going forward. Where can you get a balanced picture of what feels like a lopsided contest — is there a fair way to compare all of these two tech titans’ offerings? Well, even though they’re no longer completely comparable, the effort is still valuable so we can glean something out of this attempt.
Features & Benefits
AWS features
These are the features AWS provides — or rather, these does it not offer? It is conceivably the first to market and market leader to have everything and is constantly updating all of its resources as well as service offerings, keeping analysts, devs, and bloggers on their toes.
AWS has every amazing form of server, offers hybrid cloud technology extension through VMware Cloud on AWS, and offers hardware on-site via Outpost. AWS also provides US services Governing regions prepared for the possibility of large contracts.
Google Cloud
With Anthos — the repackaging with their well-adopted and well-respected Kubernetes multiple cloud engine — Google can deliver a service that will make applications for their customers modern, compatible across any public or private cloud environment, and modular enough to change quickly for the future — even taking advantage of more of their offerings such as Artificial intelligence And machine learning.
It is especially aimed at younger startups that can move quicker and do not need to worry about legacy code, ensuring a rapid go-to-market. Furthermore, GCP continues to promote open source, which supports consumers by offering (again) well-supported and frictionless tools to help bring goods out of the door.
Some of the GCP-supported open-source technologies-from past successes to new relationships-are listed below. Those are delivered by Alliances as managed services.
- Past successes
- Kubernetes (orchestral container)
- Go (Speech programming)
- Machine Learning (TensorFlow)
- Different Partnerships
- Confluent (flows in real-time)
- Elastic (Analytics and data)
- MongoDB (base)
- Redis Labs (datenbank in memory)
- DataStax (spread database)
- InfluxData (the data in real-time)
- Neo4j (database with graph)
It seems from the above list that GCP is going all-in on data analytics — choosing to be the one-time and future hub for data.
Not only that, but the focus GCP places on a fast development process could be a step (or a half step) back to Google’s “don’t be bad” original days. This is to be decided if the few open source solutions selected succeed as opposed to others, but there are clear benefits to the cloud-agnostic approaches of clients.
Cloud Revenue
Data from the last few years was transparent and the new data from Q2 2019 is no different. AWS controls 33 percent of cloud market share, while GCP controls 8 percent, according to Synergy Research Group. Which kind of sales does that look like? AWS had Q2 revenue of $8.4B, while GCP’s Q2 revenue was unrevealed, but they announced that they had an annual sales run rate of $8B, calculated at $2B per year.
AWS has the vast force, and they don’t seem to be afraid to disclose it (Microsoft — interestingly — hasn’t announced its Azure Q2 2019 sales yet, but we have a good image of how Azure is gradually gaining market share lead on AWS, albeit in a growing sector).
And what is a multi-billion dollar self-respecting, not-be-evil organization to do when the dangers of the Amazon basin jungle are closing in on all sides anywhere that you turn?
Google Cloud vs AWS
First and foremost, judging by previous forays into all sorts of technologies (self-driving vehicles, IoT, mobile), Google isn’t one to back off a battle. They have at least provided a very viable deal with a few nice differentiators to their customers. They have a common perspective on the fundamentals of cloud pricing:
- Per-second billing on, among others, the Compute Engine, Container Engine, Cloud Dataproc, App Engine, and Persistent Disks.
- Build-your-own server types, where you combine the compute and memory specs you want and reap price benefits.
- Sustained usage discounts, which are implemented automatically when running other types of compute engines and services from Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).
In via the side door
With Anthos’ release, Google is putting much greater emphasis on a strategy that they think they can win at containers and the hybrid cloud market. With 80% of all IT still on-site data centers and big organizations and more of the (old-fashioned) on-site servers running homogenous (old-fashioned) applications, Google is betting that by using Kubernetes, GKE and the entire Anthos ecosystem, they will streamline creation and connectivity everywhere.
Who’s the winner?
We might have thought about this for days. It’s not easy to compare dynamic systems like Google Cloud and AWS. Yet we do like to use data here at Cloud Academy. Check out Stack Rack — Emerging Technologies, which shows that while AWS is the top online skill set to be spoken about, Kubernetes (number 21) is the only tech created by Google on the list— Even GCP itself is barely cracking the top 40 as far as participation in online career discussions is concerned.
We feel this further shows that the market is showing that there is interest in the multiple cloud container perspective and that grip does not inherently have to benefit one service provider. This also jives with the idea that Google is making a concerted effort to help developers and companies produce the best product as easily as possible. They know they need to find new ways to spread their creativity because while they’re not the largest player, they’re still a Goliath and could have a gigantic-sized effect if properly implemented.
