AWS – the unbeatable giant….but what about Google Cloud Platform?

Laurence Downing Specialist DevOps
Consultant at ISL Recruitment

Cloud computing has taken the world by storm, leaving businesses free of the need for complex on-site server rooms and introducing them to efficient, secure and reliable data protection. With tech giants such as Amazon Web Services, Azure and Google all investing heavily in the advancement of their hardware and software, competition for obtaining the greatest market share has reached an unparalleled high. This in turn, is good news for consumers as inter-provider competition will drive costs down.

Amazon Web Services still remains by far the market leader of cloud services, however, between Azure and Google Cloud both saw a significant growth in public adoption of their cloud services between 2016 and 2017. In particular, Azure saw a 14% growth and Google Cloud a 5% growth, with IBM and Oracle not falling far behind at around 2-3% growth (RightScale 2017 State of the Cloud Report).

Since then, Google Cloud Platform has secured its spot amongst the “big three” cloud providers, however, Amazon’s $18 billion cloud business continues to dominate the market, over and Microsoft and Google. As usual, in 2017 all major cloud provider released their earnings report at the same time giving analysts the opportunity to examine the numbers in more detail. According to ‘ParkMyCloud’ AWS reported $4.6 billion in revenue for the quarter and a 42% year-over-year increase, whereas google had estimated earnings of $870 million for the quarter and a 76% year-over-year growth. So although AWS has clearly dominated the market, Google’s growth is rapidly advancing and one may agree that Google is just beginning to take off.

Google’s stock continues to rise, and they have recently hired nearly 2,495 more people – the majority of whom are set to focus on Google’s Cloud Platform. Google is gearing itself up for big things in 2018 and they have recently made major deals with retail giants and payment processors such as PayPal, making clear that expanding its cloud platform sales is in Google’s top three priorities for the company.

To all of my business owner connections out there, it’s important to remember that the superior cloud service for your company is entirely dependent on the needs of your business. According to ParkMyCloud, the basic questions still remain in choosing the best provide for you:

What is the pricing structure?

Are the public cloud offering easily comprehensible?

Is there sufficient customer support and growth options?

Does the cloud platform offer sufficient security measures for your business?

Will your DevOps processes translate to these services?

According to Forrester’s 10 Cloud Computing predictions for 2018, “AWS, Google, and Microsoft will capture 76% of all cloud platform revenue in 2018, 80% by 2020” and that “ more than 50% of global enterprises will rely on at least one public cloud platform by the end of 2018.”To read more about the predicted growth trends of the “big three” cloud giants this year, I recommend checking out this article by the Forbes!