How to Choose Between AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform

Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform all provide extremely competitive, feature rich cloud platforms, so choosing the platform for your business can be a difficult task. While one may be tempted to focus on pricing, there are many more factors that should be considered when deciding which platform is right for your business. We don’t believe looking at a feature list is sufficient for deciding which platform is right for your business, rather we focus on the following factors when helping a company decide between the proper platform.

Your Current Systems

What are your current systems? Do you have several on-premises Windows servers that you intend to migrate to the cloud? Do you already use some AWS services such as S3 buckets? Are you a Google GSuite user? We perform a thorough evaluation of your current systems to access potential migration scenarios.

Your Strategy

Is your goal to be completed cloud based or do you prefer a hybrid cloud strategy. If focused on a hybrid strategy with many on-premises legacy Windows Servicers, Azure is definitely a strong contender.

Your Team

What are the skills of your current team members. Are they already familiar with a particular platform and therefore the learning curve will be short as compared to learning an entirely different platform. This is particularly important as you consider the training cost for your team and consultant expenses while your in-house team ramps up.

Your Workload

What services do you intend to move to the cloud? Evaluation of these services against the services of each platform can quickly narrow your decision. For example, if you’re seeking a cloud based SFTP service, only one platform currently offers this service natively. Thoroughly documenting and then evaluating each service you intend to move to the cloud is a very important step in making a cloud platform decision.

Availability Zones

Availability Zones are physical data centers within the cloud service provider region.
AWS has 66 availability zones with 12 more on the way. Azure has 54 regions worldwide and is available in 140 countries all around the world. Google Cloud Platform has been made available in 20 regions around the world with 3 more on their way. We evaluate if there are aspects of your business or customers that make a particular country or data center location advantageous for your business.

Pricing

We left pricing last intentionally. While we do not believe pricing should be the driving factor, it could be a deciding factor. Google Cloud Platform offers automatic discounts for sustained use. AWS offers spot instances which is auction based pricing for unused capacity. All the providers are competitively priced, but GCP is the simplest and most aggressive. Additionally, pricing consideration has to be focused on the services you’ll be using.

Case Study

We recently worked with an agency client to help move them to the cloud while building their analytics practice. We considered Azure, AWS and Google Cloud Platform, but ultimately the decision was made to move to Azure. There were several factors that went into this decision: Their IT Team was familiar with Microsoft products, have historically used on-premises Windows Servers and they’re currently using Office 365 for Productivity tools. Additionally, the team has some familiarity with Microsoft Power BI, which is a business intelligence tool that works seamlessly with Azure. The migration team help move databases to Azure SQL Database, migrated ETL solutions into Azure Data Factory, moved SQL into the new environment and configured Power BI. We’re continuing to work with the team on training, but the learning curve has been significantly decreased as a result of moving to a platform they’re familiar with.