- Okay, hello Cloud Gurus, Scott Pletcher here
and welcome to another edition
of Cloud Provider Comparisons.
In this series, we take a look at the same cloud services
across different cloud providers,
and we look at the similarities, the differences,
and anything else that might be interesting.
In this episode, we're gonna take a more meta perspective
and talk about how the big three cloud providers compare
at an organizational level.
If you're curious about how Azure, AWS,
and Google Cloud platform match up, stick around.
(upbeat music)
It's hard to remember that Amazon
was once just a scrappy e-commerce startup
and they did things that many startups do
in the heat of growth,
build up technical debt. (bell dings)
In 2000, very much out of necessity,
Amazon made their strategic technology decision
to start building reusable modules
for its internal development groups.
This allowed these groups to create new features faster
because they weren't always reinventing the same thing
over and over again.
As time went on, the collection of internal services grew
and people inside the company started to realize
that maybe there's a business opportunity there.
First launched in 2004 and then relaunched in 2006
with three public pay-as-you-go services,
Amazon Web Services set sail into the uncharted waters
of what we now call cloud computing.
Now, around the same time
AWS announced their first cloud services,
Microsoft already had similar efforts in play,
doing much the same thing as Amazon,
stitching together disparate services
and creating reusable components for internal staff.
Microsoft officially announced that it had something cooking
for the cloud in 2008, which they called
Project Red Dog because, (dog barks)
well, pink poodle just didn't have a really nice ring to it.
(dog whines)
Officially released as Windows Azure in 2010,
Microsoft's first iteration of cloud service
wasn't really that good.
It couldn't even run a standard version of Windows server.
A bit of dogfooding and an offsite retreat
in 2011 was enough to convince the players
in Azure's leadership that they needed to do better,
if they hoped to be competitive
with the likes of AWS and Google.
Azure relaunched in 2013 much better positioned
and a much more compelling option for organizations,
especially those who were longtime Microsoft shops
and were looking for a smooth path
to leverage the growing cloud wave that was coming.
In 2014, Windows Azure was renamed Microsoft Azure,
which symbolically and literally marked a shift
in strategy for Microsoft making the cloud a priority.
Google's cloud origins have been baked in
from the very start,
but officially entered the public cloud in April, 2008,
through the preview release of Google App Engine,
aimed at letting developers quickly deploy
and scale web applications.
Now, in contrast to AWS and Microsoft,
who emphasized heavily the infrastructure
as a service path in their early days,
Google chose a platform as a service, PaaS.
And over the next several years,
Google used its world-class development organization,
acquisitions and deep pockets to grow GCP
into something that can compete
with its fellow public cloud providers.
(upbeat music)
Both Google Cloud platform and Google Workplace,
formerly G Suite, are business segments within Google.
Google itself as a business segment
within its parent holding company, Alphabet.
At present, Azure falls
into the Microsoft Intelligent Cloud business segment,
which covers all the server and cloud products,
as well as the support and consulting parts of the business
and GitHub, which Microsoft purchased in 2018.
AWS is a division within Amazon,
but operates as its own entity within the greater company.
The commerce side of Amazon is a customer of AWS,
meaning that AWS has to compete for business
just as if they were an external company.
Now, one thing to note when comparing cloud providers
with regard to revenue is that
their reporting groupings (coins jingling)
are not the same.
Amazon reports AWS revenue separately,
while Google includes both GCP and their Workplace product
as part of their cloud revenue.
Microsoft bundles Azure, on-prem server software,
Visual Studio, and GitHub into their reporting segment.
Sometimes Microsoft also refers
to their commercial cloud category of products,
which includes Azure, Office 365, Dynamics 365,
and part of LinkedIn.
As of this recording,
Microsoft has yet to publish revenue numbers,
just purely for Azure itself.
(upbeat music)
Let's look at some customers for each platform.
Google Cloud platform is home to gaming company,
Activision Blizzard, Airline Lufthansa, and SpaceX.
Azure boosts mega customers, such as AT&T,
Coca-Cola and Walmart.
The latter has even announced
some special partnerships with Microsoft,
presumably joining forces to compete with Amazon.
AWS counts many huge companies as customers.
Netflix is probably the most well-known
given their massive streaming infrastructure.
Online companies like Twitch and Twitter
also use the platform,
as do media companies like Turner Broadcasting
and the BBC.
Again, you have to use caution here
when looking at providers' logo slides.
Even if some small, obscure, tiny division of a huge company
uses the platform to store a 3K file on object storage,
that provider is more than happy to claim the logo
all for itself.
Additionally, many of these large companies
have lots of divisions,
some of which they may have acquired
or still in the process of integrating.
It's not uncommon for huge companies
to be using four or five different cloud providers
throughout their vast organizations.
(upbeat music)
How about some comparative strengths of each platform?
Microsoft has been providing software to business customers
for some 40-ish years,
so they know what large enterprises want and how to deliver.
Additionally, Azure provides
a pretty compelling transition path to the cloud
and can be that one-stop shop for enterprises
looking to limit (tech music)
their vendor list.
AWS has had almost a seven-year headstart
and vastly more offerings at present than other competitors.
With that head start, the available talent pool is larger,
meaning that more people know AWS.
However, if we've learned one thing here at A Cloud Guru,
it's that with a little time and training,
anyone can learn to cloud.
So that talent pool issue thing might not be as significant
as it once was.
Then there's GCP,
who had neither (logo pops)
a strong enterprise footprint or a headstart.
They have been staffing up on leaders
from other enterprise-focused companies like SAP and Oracle,
which will no doubt help there.
And as you might've heard, containers are all the rage now.
And Google just happens to originated
one of the most popular container orchestration systems,
that being Kubernetes.
GCP has spun their container expertise
into a portfolio of services under the Anthos name,
which is getting lots of attention nowadays.
(gentle music)
Well, with strengths come weaknesses.
So what are some challenges facing our cloud providers?
Well, when you're as big as Amazon,
you're bound to step on a few toes.
Many retailers view Amazon as a direct competitor,
and just can't bring themselves to give any business
whatsoever to AWS for this reason.
As the Amazon empire grows into other industries,
this sentiment will likely grow as well.
Similarly, as Amazon grows,
the more scrutiny it will attract from governments
and other groups for being well too big,
something Microsoft and Google know all too well.
With AWS being a huge portion of Amazon's revenue,
it might eventually get sold or spun off.
Now, that's not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing,
just a bit of uncertainty.
YouTube and search are the main revenue sources for Google.
And we might be tempted to think of GCP
as being relegated to a desk in the basement
with its little red stapler. (stapler clicks)
However, public cloud is considered
a growth opportunity for Google,
who continues to invest in data centers and acquisitions.
Then there's the deprecation policy.
This means that Google can and will shut down products
and features and maybe create something new in its place.
Great for Google,
but not so great if your mission-critical application
depends on that service.
That might go bye, bye.
In contrast, Azure and AWS
have much more developer-friendly sunsetting policies
and backwards compatibility philosophies.
For the past decade or so,
open-source software has found great acceptance,
both on-prem and in the cloud,
largely due to organizations seeking alternatives
to commercial software vendors like Microsoft.
Microsoft, to its credit,
has leaned into the open-source community slowly at first
but now pretty significantly,
mostly in the software development space.
But make no mistake about it,
Microsoft would still love for you to buy lots
and lots of software licenses
as that remains an important source of revenue for them.
(upbeat music)
So how do I possibly choose
which cloud provider is best for me?
Well, there's really no best universal answer
because all situations are different.
I suggest conducting some pilot projects
with these providers.
And I'd also throw in IBM, Oracle Cloud, SAP or Alibaba,
if you have an existing relationship
with those companies already.
Maybe try to do the same project on multiple providers
and evaluate things like ease of use,
robustness of offerings, quality of documentation,
and so forth.
If you're concerned about becoming too locked
into one provider,
you can choose some architectures
that are more open and universal,
like using layers of abstraction,
building around REST APIs and using containers.
But be cautious here because you can get too generic.
If you're just using your cloud provider
to run the same old VMs and containers that you had on-prem,
you're likely missing out on lots of value
that cloud provider can offer in the way of managed services
and variable costs.
Now, I know this may be controversial,
but I would steer clear of trying to spread your workload
out over multiple cloud providers.
I know, I know some people think
that using multiple cloud providers
shields them from the dreaded vendor lock-in.
I think that spreading your workloads
across multiple clouds just dilutes your resources
and makes things needlessly complicated.
Rather, I believe it's better to focus your upskilling
and efforts to maximize the features
and value of one provider.
Go deep on that provider and get really good,
whomever it happens to be.
Well, my friends,
this has been Cloud Provider Comparisons, Meta Edition.
Thanks for sticking around, stay safe,
take care of one another and keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.
(gentle music)