Cloud computing has taken businesses by storm as it becomes more reliable and cost-efficient. Google’s cloud has kept up with Amazon’s, but which has the edge?
Oct. 23, 2020
For a long time, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) did not have any big competitors in the cloud provider space. Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), Oracle, Alibaba, and Microsoft have since changed that and have become major providers in the industry, all investing heavily in hardware, software, and networking structures to obtain more market share. This has resulted in healthy competition between the providers as they constantly innovate to keep ahead of the curve, resulting in lowered costs and unparalleled cloud performance for clients.
What is Google Cloud Platform?
Google Cloud Platform consists of services and solutions that allow users to utilize the same software and hardware infrastructure that Google uses for its other products, like YouTube and Gmail. Google App Engine, allows app developers to build scalable web and mobile back ends, which was launched in 2008 as its first service.
Google Compute Engine is one of the company’s most successful products, allowing users to launch virtual machines on demand. It was available for general release back in 2013 and huge brands use the software, including Apple, Philips, Domino’s Pizza, Sony Music, PayPal, along with many others. In 2019, Google’s Cloud Platform’s annual run rate was over $8 billion, up from $4 billion the year prior.
This week, Google Cloud launched Lending DocAI, its first dedicated mortgage tool for the lending industry. Lending DocAI will speed up the process of analyzing a borrower’s income and asset documents by using machine learning to automate standard document reviews. Google’s product manager, Sudheera Vanguri, said the goal with this tool is to ‘reduce mortgage processing time and costs, streamline data capture, and support regulatory and compliance requirements”
Amazon Web Service
Amazon Web Service (AWS) paved the way for cloud computing services. It provides products and solutions to businesses and individuals since its launch back in 2006. The Amazon EC2 is very like the Google Compute Engine, however, Amazon had a six-year headstart on Google. Netflix, NASA, Airbnb, and Lamborghini are just some of its big-name users. In Q2 of this year, AWS brought in $10 billion in revenue, making up a total of 13.5% of Amazon’s total revenue.
How does Google Cloud Platform compare to AWS?
Both providers have over 50 different products, so it may be impossible to compare each individually. Let’s discuss network, billing, and security.
Network
Google has invested in its global infrastructure, including new data centers, decreasing latency, and ensuring faster loading times for clients. Google Computer Engine products reach 24 locations across the world and are currently continuing to launch new locations. In 2017, it launched the premium tier and standard tier networks, making it the first big public cloud to offer a tiered cloud network, this helps traffic to flow between locations seamlessly if there is any network disruption.
AWS network operates in more locations than Googles, 44 to be precise. It also has data centers and availability zones to improve redundancy and low latency. Like Google, they offer AWS Direct Connect which allows users to establish a network connection between a network and one of the company’s direct connect locations. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud and ways of accelerating content delivery via Amazon CloudFront are also popular services.
Billing
Billing is handled very differently by both companies. Google Cloud Platform offers estimated reports with its BigQuery tool and AWS provides a dashboard for user’s bills. Both are making strides to lower costs and make billing simpler, and both cloud providers launch their versions of per-second billing for clients who do a lot of work in a short period of time.
Google and AWS both offer discounts, free trials, and incentives to their clients. In a study of Google’s 3-year Committed Use Discount compared with AWS – like discount, the total cost of a Google environment was 35% lower than AWS.
Security
Security was an area Google was perfecting long before its cloud computing platforms ever existed. Users benefit from a security model that has been fine-tuned over the last 15 years, Google also employs over 500 security professionals. Google uses its existing relationships with big ISPs to improve data security, meaning users’ data has less movement across the public internet so offers more security.
Similar to Google, AWS has a solid security platform that has been enhanced over the last decade. AWS offers flexible key management, the user can choose whether they want to keep their own encryption keys or allow Amazon to control them.
So, which is better?
AWS benefits from being the first provider in the cloud computing industry and they are still the ones that other companies are copying, it also has the most data centers around the world. The support, redundancy, and availability that AWS provides in different regions are excellent. Google, on the other hand, is expanding rapidly across the world, its speed and pricing are very competitive which could give them a slight edge. Ultimately, it comes down to which is better suited to a businesses needs.
MyWallSt operates a full disclosure policy. MyWallSt staff currently hold long positions in companies mentioned above. Read our full disclosure policy here.