What is Azure?

Microsoft Azure is a public cloud provider. It is available in 54 geographic regions and has 162 availability zones. It offers a robust Infrastructure as a Service portfolio (IaaS), as well as Platform as a Service capabilities (PaaS), which are especially useful for Windows applications.

Azure offers many benefits, including big data and analytics, mobile and game app creation, data warehouse, DevOps and agile development pipelines.



What is the Google Cloud Platform?

GCP, Google's public Cloud Provider, is relatively new to the cloud computing market. As of 2019, it is available in 20 different geographic regions. GCP, however, compensates for its limited scope by taking advantage of Google's unmatched size. It makes use Google's private fibre-optic network which allows for lightning fast communication between data centers. Join Google Cloud Platform training to know more about it.



Google Cloud offers excellent container support due to its close relationship with Kubernetes. It was also designed with customer-friendly pricing, which is a way to make it easier and more accessible than other cloud services while remaining less expensive.

Azure vs. Google Cloud: Market Position

Gartner's 2020 Magic Quadrant of Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services identifies Amazon Web Services as the leader. Azure and Google Cloud are close behind.



Microsoft Azure (Gartner Analysis)


Complete end-to-end solutions

Platform as a Service leads (PaaS).

Strong solutions would be a benefit to developers.

It's a great option for Microsoft's technology stack because it offers extensive Linux support.


Microsoft Azure (Market Share)


The second largest cloud provider in the entire world

Microsoft's cloud company, which includes Azure, generates more that $50 billion annually in revenue.

Microsoft was not adversely affected by the COVID-19 crisis.

Azure grew by 48% in 2020 year-over-year.

Google Cloud (Gartner Analysis)



Leaders in Database as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service

Google Anthos is the best hybrid and multi-cloud platform.

Containers and Kubernetes are supported by a lot.


Google Cloud (Market Share)



The third largest cloud provider in the entire world.

Google Cloud Platform is worth over $13 billion per year.

Google Cloud grew by 45 percent in 2020 year-over-year.


Prices for Google Cloud vs. Azure

Microsoft Azure pricing


Reserved VM instances are eligible for a substantial discount if you commit to it for 1-3 years.

You can save up to 40% if you use Microsoft software on-premises.

Visual Studio customers receive significant discounts on Azure creations and testing instances

If you have a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement (EA), you will receive additional discounts on cloud computing services.

Azure offers a limited-offering tier for free, as well as a 12-month trial that includes several other services and a $200 voucher that can be used to test every paid service.


Pricing for Google Cloud


You are eligible to receive a 30% discount if you continue to use the same instance throughout a month.

Preemptible Virtual Machine Instances are a great option for jobs that can be stopped or restarted later, but do not require high availability.

You can get discounts up to 57% if you commit to long-term use of a virtual machine (such as Azure reserved VMs).

GCP offers a free Tier with basic services that are always available and $300 credit to test other services.

As you can see, there are many services available. It is easy to lose track of potential costs as each product has its own pricing section and overview. This even applies when there are only a few storage and computation resources. Cloud pricing is complex and depends on what services are used, how much storage is required, bandwidth consumed and other variables. It's best to use the calculators provided by each vendor and enter your usage parameters.



Conclusion


When comparing the two cloud giants, we were searching for the same answer that many others: Which is better, Google Cloud of Azure? After extensive research and collecting data, the truth is that we don't really know. Each company offers a wide range of high-quality services and products, with many advantages that far outweigh any disadvantages.

I like Azure because it provides you with a big set of features and services and it is very easy to utilize them. Yes, Azure allows the development teams to use its products without having expertise in Microsoft or any computing background. However, if we talk about better pricing and cheap storage properties then you can give more marks to Google Cloud. It is also very simple to use its PaaS products like Google App Engine. Yes, you can easily find Google App Engine among different PaaS examples like these but it is hard to find Azure among these vendors.

So, it could be a setback for Azure. Similarly, when it comes to filing storage, I prefer Google Cloud Firestore instead of Azure because of its approach to NAS and it's quickly integrates with Google Kubernetes Engine. On the other hand, Azure depends on conventional SMB protocol. The only thing that I don't like about Google Cloud products is their vendor lock-in policy. I think Google should change it as soon as possible.