Google Cloud vs AWS: Which One Should You Choose?

In the fast-paced world of cloud computing, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) have emerged as two prominent contenders, each offering an array of powerful tools and services. As different businesses increasingly migrate their operations to the cloud, the decision of which cloud provider to choose becomes crucial in shaping the future of their digital infrastructure.

When we talk about cloud computing, there comes a lot of questions about which cloud services you need to choose that best suit your requirements. Since it is a relatively new field and several cloud giants provide the services for a price, people tend to search and ask which of these is most suited to their needs. Which service would work better for them? Google Computing Services or Amazon Web Services?

Here, we will compare Google Cloud and AWS on the following parameters:

• Shares
• Services
• Pricing
• Machine Types
• Regions and Zones
• Big Data Analytics
• Free Trials
• Cloud Security

Google Cloud vs AWS: Which One Should You Choose?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) was launched in 2006 publicly. Initially, it started as an initiative to upscale its internal resources, but in later stages, found out the potential existence of such a service, and hence, decided to launch it as a commercial cloud computing platform whereas Google Cloud Platform (GCP) was officially launched in 2008. But Google had been offering cloud services before this under different names for separate delivery models. Afterward, Google expanded its services to encompass a broad variety of things to provide services which is when GCP was formed and created.

So, let’s see the difference between AWS and GCP on the 8 different parameters.

1. Market Shares

From the graph below we can again say that the top three companies with the most Market Shares are AWS, GCP, and Azure. And again, Amazon Web Services is the leader in all this.

The top companies for cloud computing are AWS, Microsoft Azure, GCP, Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent.

According to sources from Statista,As of January 2024, AWS (Amazon Web Services) holds 41.5% of the cloud computing market share, followed by Azure having 23 percent, of the total market share, which is then followed by Google Cloud Platforms (GCP) with about 10 percent share in the market. According to Wire19, a news report stated that these three companies, AWS, Azure, and GCP account for about 66 percent of the worldwide market. 

From all of this, it is inferred that AWS has the highest amount of market shares.

2. Services

Services	Amazon Web Services (AWS)	Google Cloud Platforms (GCP)
Compute	In the case of virtual machines, Amazon Elastic compute cloud, Amazon Lightsail, Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, and so on. In the case of Containers AWS provides Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, for serverless network AWS Lambda and so much more.	In the case of Cloud computing, Compute Engines, Tau VMs, Cloud GPUs For containers, GCP provides Google Kubernetes Engine and Cloud Run, and for serverless networks, GCP provides the App engine.
Storage	Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), Amazon Glacier, AWS Storage Gateway, etc.	Google Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL (managed relational database service), Cloud Spanner (horizontally scalable relational database), Cloud Bigtable (NoSQL database), Cloud Filestore (managed file storage), and many more.
Databases	Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon DynamoDB (NoSQL database), Amazon ElastiCache (in-memory caching), Amazon Neptune (graph database), Amazon Redshift (data warehousing), and more.	Cloud Firestore (NoSQL document database), Firebase Realtime Database, Memorystore (in-memory data store), Cloud Datastore (NoSQL database), etc.
Networking	Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Elastic Load Balancer (ELB), Amazon Route 53 (DNS service), Amazon CloudFront (content delivery network), AWS Direct Connect, and many others.	Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Load Balancing, Cloud CDN, Cloud DNS, Cloud Interconnect, and more.
Big Data and Analytics	Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce), Amazon Athena (interactive query service), Amazon Kinesis (real-time streaming), Amazon Redshift (data warehousing), and AWS Glue (ETL service).	BigQuery (fully managed data warehouse), Cloud Dataflow (real-time and batch data processing), Cloud Pub/Sub (messaging service), Cloud Dataproc (managed Apache Spark and Hadoop), and more.
Machine Learning and AI	Amazon SageMaker (managed machine learning service), Amazon Rekognition (image and video analysis), Amazon Comprehend (natural language processing), Amazon Lex (chatbots), and Amazon Polly (text-to-speech).	AutoML (automated machine learning), Cloud Vision API (image analysis), Cloud Translation API, Cloud Speech-to-Text, Cloud Natural Language API, and many others.

3. Regions and Zones

Shown below are the Availability regions of both GCP and AWS. Since AWS has been around for longer than GCP, it has been able to provide much more available regions and has several more planned too much more when in comparison to GCP.

• AWS Availability Regions: As of now, there are 105 availability zones across 33 geographic regions worldwide.

• GCP Availability Regions:Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has 24 regions and 73 zones.

4. Big Data Analytics

As mentioned earlier, both GCP and AWS provide the best tools when it comes to big data analytics such as Amazon’s Redshift and Athena in AWS and BigQuery and DataProc in GCP. Even though GCP provides various serverless options for data analytics in the cloud, Amazon has the most serverless data analytics options and also is efficient in disaster management in case of network loss or data loss, which it will take care of easily. Another aspect of Big Data Analytics in which AWS trumps GCP is its ease in the scalability of applications. It is very easy to scale any analytics tools in AWS as compared to GCP.

Some common provisions are:

• Scalability
• Streaming and Transfer of Data
• Data Storage
• SQL-based querying
• Serverless Capabilities
• Integration with any Ecosystems
• Management of service

5. Pricing

• Pricing: Both GCP and AWS offer various pay-as-you-go options and committed use discounts for sustained usage. Carefully evaluating your specific needs and usage patterns is crucial before concluding which provider is cheaper, as it depends on numerous factors.
• Instance comparison: Use the pricing calculators of both platforms and compare instances with equal specifications (RAM, vCPUs, etc.) for an accurate price comparison.
• Upfront payment: While GCP doesn’t offer direct upfront payment, they do offer committed use discounts which can significantly reduce costs if you commit to a specific usage level over time. AWS might offer upfront payment options, but it’s not always the most cost-effective strategy.

6. Free-Tier Services

Both GCP and AWS provide free tiers in different ways.

• GCP provides a 300$ free credit to every new user and provides new products along the way too.
• AWS provides multiple offers for free 12-month usage along with also providing “Always Free” offers too such as free 25 GB usage of Amazon DynamoDB.

As seen above, both AWS and GCP provide great services, but AWS provides way more functionalities when it comes to free tier options.

7. Cloud Security

Both AWS and GCP deal with security issues differently. In the case of GCP, it provides security measures in 3 different ways as seen here. In short, they provide:

• Meeting digital sovereignty and secure cloud
• Detect and respond to threats faster: In this case, GCP provides the Chronicle Security Operations suite which will work across the entire ecosystem better.
• Priorities are given to threats that matter most to you: Using the Digital Risk protection from Mandiant

In the case of AWS, aside from providing cloud security requirements such as:

• Data locality
• Protection, and
• Confidentiality

It provides several benefits/packages which utilize a pay-per-use model such as:

• Largest Ecosystem of security partners
• Secure Scaling along with great visibility control
• Risk Reduction and its Automation and so much more.

From this, it is obvious that AWS again has the upper hand in the sheer number of functionalities.

8. Future Demand and Scope

When it comes to the scope in both GCP and AWS, it is pretty bright, and securing a viable career is quite possible.

If we talk about AWS, even though there’s no new mention of building new servers, or websites which may change the foundation, due to its longevity in the market, we can assume it will stay for even longer since it is quite strong and there are not many competitors for them along with the fact that they are probably the most well-known cloud service providers bodes well for their future.

On the other side, GCP while being younger than AWS, still does not provide as many functionalities as AWS nor does it hold as much of a share, but still, due to its plethora of apps developed by Google such as Gmail, Google Photos, Google Drive, and so on, it is obvious they will expand and optimize themselves even more in various ways when it comes to providing cloud services.

Conclusion

Though there’s a definitive answer in comparison to different functionalities, it is impossible to accurately inform which may be better for the average consumer. In a world with its ever-shifting needs, functionalities, and fundamental architectures, various services offered by both these services may appeal to people from different backgrounds and perspectives. Hence, it all boils down to what you’re looking for in a cloud service provider.

FAQs

What is the major difference between GCP and AWS?

AWS and GCP both provide cloud services on a large scale but GCP focuses on integration with the Google ecosystem while AWS has more services and a longer market than GCP.

Should I learn AWS or GCP first?

It depends on your specific project requirements, goals, and the job market. it’s a personal choice to which services want to learn first.

Which pays more AWS or GCP?

The pay scale depends upon various factors such as job role, experience level, and location.