AWS remains the market leader for the 9 years in a row. Microsoft has narrowed this gap, but no reliable data on its IaaS / PaaS turnover can be found, although Forbes claims otherwise. (Not the first time I have read the same predictions from there) Google Cloud is also coming behind strong... IBM and Oracle have... well they haven't been a real threat to anyone, but Alibaba Cloud is a black sheep that might do some magic in the market. You can read more about this topic from Synergy Research Groups post here.

Seems that it's very hard to get reliable figures of the real cloud spend ( and here I mean, real from my perspective, so no email or office services included), but we shall belive those at hand :)

The Race between the biggest providers has been the same at least for the past 4 years.

If you compare these two Gartners magic quandrants from 2016 and 2019

You can find more past MQ's here and make your own interpretations of the subject.

So, which one to choose?

With these things in mind, I can say with good conscience that AWS is always a good choice. However, for those who have used to Windows type of user interfaces, it may not be that easy to use and operate. It requires a skilled partner or own expertise.

Microsoft has invested millions in developing more and more services, and even though the results are starting to show, sadly it has also meant lots of unstable poorly documented services. Among those customers who have used Microsoft products for ages, Azure seems like a logical route out of own data center. However, Azure is still partly undeveloped compared with AWS. Microsoft's legacy in selling licenses still shows in most of its actions and it still has some miles to catch up AWS. Google has followed its own path and as the latest arrival, it has been able to learn from mistakes others have done.

Let's dig in deeper

IaaS – Infrastructure as a service

All three are offering quite similar services from the IaaS perspective. I made a quick and dirty pricing calculation which shows that AWS has the lowest price... for on-demand pricing, but Azure has the lower price when committed for a longer period. Google's on-demand pricing is in the middle and both 1 and 3 years reserved are the highest in this comparison.

There are as many ways to calculate the usage pricing as there are solutions to be fitted into the cloud. You can check out this and notice that when using GPU optimized reserved instances AWS might be cheapest and when using compute-optimized capacity Google could have the lowest price. So as we say often in the IT industry "It depends" and this will not be a crucial factor when making a selection between providers.

PaaS – Platform as a service

However, there are differences when comparing the features and prices of PaaS components. AWS, Azure, and Google all focus on developing new services and improving existing ones. especially when we talk about services related to machine learning, analytics or database services.

PaaS components are ideal when developing in an agile way without the need to build everything by scratch. With serverless architecture, you are able to fail fast and build modular, cost-efficient and scalable systems in a pace like never before

Attention should be paid to supplier independence when using PaaS / FaaS components. It may not matter to your business, but it is always good, at least on paper, to plan how you can successfully switch platform from cloud to cloud if the need someday arises. Just that you have something to show for your compliance :)

Hybrid Cloud for those in need

Hybrid cloud offering has evolved hugely in the past few years. Now all of the three have an offering how to handle hybrid needs. But the sad thing is that none of them are feasible others than fortune 500 companies.

All of these VMware Solution enables customers running on-premises VMware workloads to seamlessly migrate to Cloud without having to re-architect or refactor their applications. Leverage the value of your existing VMware investments while maintaining operational continuity and avoiding data center management, hardware refreshes, and procurement cycles. These also extends customers capabilities to use native cloud services and enables to leverage those as an integrated part of their VMware environments.

So, go figure...