Google Cloud vs AWS: Comparing GCP and AWS in 2024

When deciding on which cloud platform is the best, AWS, being the first one of its kind, always finds its way to the conversation. And, Google with its ground-breaking products already has everyone’s attention. So, when the talk of the town is about Google’s Cloud Platform, people just assume that it’s going to be as excellent as Google’s other products. And that is why it becomes consequently important to compare these two major cloud platforms. So, how do you decide which one to choose? How do you conclude the big AWS Vs Google Cloud debate? Well, this blog is how you’ll get answers to all these questions.

Check out this GCP vs AWS video:

Without further ado, get started!

Google Cloud vs AWS: Establishment

Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services is a subsidiary of Amazon, which provides an on-demand Cloud Computing platform to individuals, companies, and governments on a paid subscription basis.

Amazon was the first major cloud provider, and therefore it has more experience in the cloud domain than Google or other cloud providers. As one of the oldest cloud providers, it has been able to establish a bigger user base, as well as bigger trust and reliability factors.

AWS was publicly launched in 2006 with service offerings such as Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), etc. By 2009, Elastic Block Store (EBS) was made public, and services such as Amazon CloudFront, Content delivery network (CDN), and more formally joined the AWS Cloud Computing Service offerings.

Google Cloud Platform

Google Cloud Platform (GCP), which is offered by Google, is a suite of Cloud Computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products such as Google Search engine, YouTube, and more of GCP.

As the world’s undeniable leader in web search, video sharing and streaming, email service, and whatnot, Google have proven its expertise in running data centers. After the launch of Amazon Web Services, Google also put this data center expertise to use and launched a suite of Cloud Computing services of its own.

Unlike Amazon, which began its voyage in the Cloud Computing domain with IaaS offerings, Google stepped into the Cloud Computing domain with PaaS as its first public cloud service, which is called App Engine. Google Cloud Computing Platform was first launched in 2011. Even though it was a little late to the party, Google Cloud is definitely making up for the lost time with its reliable and cost-efficient Cloud Computing services.

Now, except for the fact that one was launched before the other (which by the way is bound to happen), what else is different between AWS and GCP? Well, the very basic difference between these two cloud giants is the availability zones.

Move forward to know more about the availability zones in AWS and GCP!

Google Cloud vs AWS: Availability Zones

The ability to provide robust services with minimal possibility of outages is what every organization looks for in cloud providers. Regions and availability zones are what directly impact the robustness and the likeliness of outages, which is why availability zones have to be one of the top factors to keep in mind while choosing between these cloud providers.

A discussion on the availability zones of both cloud giants is given below:

Amazon Web Services

Being the first one of its kind, AWS has had a significant amount of time to expand its infrastructure. AWS is already hosting in multiple locations worldwide. AWS has been made available within 33 geographic regions all around the world. Every AWS region comprises multiple small geographic areas known as availability zones. AWS has 105 availability zones with 18 more on the way.

Google Cloud Platform

Google Cloud Platform has been made available in 121 zones all around the world with 83 more on their way, and it has 40 regions worldwide.

With clearly more Availability zones and regions than GCP, AWS is the winner here.

Google Cloud vs AWS: Market Shares & Growth Rate

When it comes to market shares, AWS is leading with more than 30 percent of the public cloud market share in its name. Google Cloud is making tremendous progress at a rate that is quickly reaching 100 percent but is still lagging behind AWS in terms of market share. The following graph depicts the market share and growth rate of top cloud providers.

According to a report from CRN, Google Cloud is lagging behind AWS by $15 billion, as it has generated revenue around $9.2 billion in the fourth quarter of 2023. In terms of market share, as per the CRN reports AWS has dropped down to 31 % while Google Cloud stands at 11%. 

So, the winner as of now in terms of market share and revenue is AWS, and the winner in terms of growth rate is without any doubt Google Cloud.

So moving on with this Google Cloud vs AWS blog, let’s now look into the major customers of both cloud giants.

Google Cloud vs AWS: Who Uses Them?

Amazon Web Services

Since AWS was established much before most of the cloud providers, including GCP, it has more experience and implementation in the cloud domain which has resulted in bigger community support. This is the reason why AWS has more high-profile customers like Netflix, Airbnb, Unilever, BMW, Samsung Xiaomi, Zinga, and more.

Google Cloud Platform

Where the early establishment and more experience has helped AWS gain a lot of high-profile customers, GCP has gained its own share of customers and user base due to the fact that they offer the same infrastructure that they use for Google Search, YouTube, and other Google products. This was more than a good enough reason for many hotshot organizations to go for GCP such as HSBC, PayPal, 20th Century Fox, Bloomberg, Domino’s, and more.

When we talk about who uses AWS and GCP, there is no one winner here since both have their own share of high-end customers. So, it’s a tie!

Moving forward in this GCP vs AWS blog, let’s learn about computing services offered by both cloud giants.

AWS Vs GCP: Services

Now you will see what both of these cloud giants have to offer in terms of services. The services that will be discussed here come under the domains of computing, database, storage, and networking.

AWS covers up around 200+ services, whereas Google Cloud has been catching up with it with over 60 services.

Take a look at the mapping of service offerings from AWS and GCP in the domains mentioned above.

Compute Services

Database Services

Storage Service

Networking Services

AWS does provide more services than GCP but GCP has all the necessary service offerings that are required for running any business. But if you want to go on the number of services, AWS is the clear winner here.

AWS vs Google Cloud: Security

Security is one among many important aspects to be considered while choosing a cloud service provider for your business. The parameters that you must look for while choosing a cloud service provider are as follows:

• Controls
• Policies
• Processes
• Technologies

Although both AWS and Google Cloud are renowned for providing cutting-edge cloud security, we have shared a detailed comparison of how the two providers protect their cloud:

• Security of their cloud: It helps to protect by default through security capabilities that are built into the underlying infrastructure of their cloud platform.
• Security in the cloud: It allows you to enhance the protection of your applications and data through additional security products and services that are available in their cloud platform.
• Security anywhere: This mainly pertains to protecting your assets regardless of location, by expanding security capabilities beyond their cloud platform with protocols such as encryption.

AWS vs Google Cloud: Support

To deploy a new cloud service, you will be required to have good expertise to achieve a task. In such a situation, you may need someone who has good expertise on the matter and recommends which provider to choose. However, both AWS and Google Cloud have extensive libraries of technical documentation. In addition to this, both cloud providers have their own thriving cloud communities, packed with thousands of cloud experts who are always willing to share their expertise and knowledge.

You can also refer to various documents or visit their official websites to seek some help on relevant topics that will help you choose the best service provider for your organization. You may witness a situation where you are required to have the expertise and need help in deciding which service to choose. At such a time, you will require advanced expertise and hands-on support.

Talking about the support model, both service providers offer basic support along with a range of additional paid premium plans. In case you are planning to opt for a premium plan, you must do your share of research and understand the services offered and what’s included in them. The premium plans will have associated fees.

Automatic Instance Scaling of Virtual Machines

Compute Engine provides the feature of autoscaling to automatically add or remove VM instances from a group of managed instances. Once the autoscaling policy is defined, the autoscaler performs automatic scaling based on the measured load.

Autoscaling is primarily done on the basis of an increase or decrease in the load. Autoscaling is highly significant in handling increases in traffic and reducing costs effectively according to the usage of resources; the lesser the resources, the lower the cost.

Both Compute Engine and Amazon EC2 support and implement autoscaling similarly, allowing you to create and remove resources in line with user-defined policies. Amazon EC2 auto-scales instances in a group, with each instance being created from a defined launch configuration. Compute Engine scales instances in a managed instance group. Each instance group is created from an instance template with resources scaled based on an autoscaling policy. Unlike Amazon EC2, Compute Engine’s autoscaler only supports dynamic scaling.

Temporary Virtual Machine Instances

The option of temporary instances is viable for people or companies with budget constraints. Temporary instances are available at regular intervals and are best used on jobs that can be interrupted without any work loss, have low priority workloads, and do not require high computational power such as rendering video.

Azure vs Google Cloud: Networking

Google Cloud Network Locations

Currently, Google Cloud network locations are available across 40 regions, 121  zones, 187 network edge locations, and 200+ countries and territories. Apart from these, established  locations have been added in Salt Lake City, Seoul, Jakarta, and Las Vegas.  Google Cloud continues to expand to locations such as Warsaw (Poland), Doha (Qatar), Toronto (Canada), Paris (France), Milan (Italy), Santiago (Chile), and Madrid (Spain).

AWS Network Locations

AWS currently has locations available in 33 regions, 105 zones, 210 network edge locations, and 245 countries and territories. Amazon offers multiple availability zones in twice as many regions as Google. As part of their future roadmap, Amazon plans to launch additional data centers in Malaysia, Mexico, Thailand and Germany.

AWS Vs Google Cloud: Downtimes

Having a comparatively more mature infrastructure, the maximum downtime phase experienced by AWS was in 2015 that lasted for 2 hours and 30 minutes. Whereas having a progressive infrastructure, Google faced a huge downtime in 2015 that lasted for 11 hours and 34 minutes.

As measures have been taken by both cloud platforms, it’s less likely for such downtime phases to happen again. However, it’s only natural that AWS gets preferred over GCP when downtimes are taken into consideration, as even the largest downtime faced by AWS was hours shorter than GCP’s downtime. That being said, the winner here is AWS.

AWS Vs Google Cloud: Pricing Models

Here’s a comparison between the pricing models of AWS and GCP on the basis of the machine type that they offer.

If you conclude here, then GCP definitely comes out as the winner in regard to pricing models. GCP offers billing on a per-second model which is way more cost-efficient as compared to AWS’ per-hour model billing. And not to forget, GCP even offers long-term usage discounts with no upfront costs.

As mentioned in the table above, with GCP, users get to save 25 percent per month on the same basic instance that AWS offers. The following graph depicts the percentage of savings in GCP when used in the long term.

By providing almost 50 percent cost efficiency, the winner here in the case of pricing is Google Cloud Platform.

Last but not least, the comparative factor for this GCP vs AWS blog is Job Trends. So moving on with this Google Cloud vs AWS blog, let’s compare the job opportunities in both the cloud Giants

AWS Vs Google Cloud: Job Trends

Talking about the Job trends in AWS and GCP, if you look at the following graph, the stats show that there have been more job postings in AWS than in GCP.

Now, this could be a direct result of the early establishment and large market shares of AWS. With 31 percent market shares, AWS clearly has had more job opportunities than GCP since 2015 till now, but that does not mean GCP can’t take over AWS in the future. GCP is still fairly young. With the growth rate at which GCP is making progress, it wouldn’t be a surprise if in a while GCP takes over AWS in the case of job trends.

The winner in the case of Job Trends as of now is AWS.

Service Providers Locations

Here are some numbers to see how these platforms compare:

Amazon Web Services

Regions: 33 launched  and 18 announced

Availability zones: 105 zones

Countries served: 245+

Microsoft Azure

Availability zones: 113

Regions: 69

Countries served: 140

Google Cloud Platform

Regions: 40

Availability zones: 109

Countries served: 200+

Check out this video on the AWS Course to enhance your knowledge:

Conclusion

So, who wins the overall cloud battle here? It’s time to conclude this debate on Google Cloud vs AWS. Before we go ahead and start weighing the pros and cons of both, one thing is for sure: Whoever comes out as the winner, GCP is a serious contender for AWS.

While Amazon Web Services might be leading in terms of the number of customers, services, products, and market shares, GCP also tends to take the lead in terms of competitive as well as cost-effective pricing models and more customization options.

And if you consider the trust factor, then Amazon Web Services, with its 5 years of a head start, surely does enjoy more trusted relationships with its clients. On the other hand, Google with its reputation for developing world-leading products surely makes Google Cloud Platform seem promising. So, all things considered, it would be better to say that the choice between Google Cloud vs AWS comes down to personal preference.