Google is well-known for contributing a lot to Open-source communities, creating and maintaining such popular projects as Android, Kubernetes, TensorFlow, V8 JavaScript framework and many more. It makes GCP a first choice if you are looking for a maximal support of open-source technologies and projects in opposition to Microsoft’s proprietary technology stack.
Google’s SaaS offerings, such as Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Maps are also very extensively used by millions of users and comprise a very handy suite of business applications under the name of Google Workspace (formerly known as G suite)
GCP offers over 90 different Cloud products, some of which are based on technologies created by Google, but open and available to be used by other players, such as Kubernetes and TensorFlow.
Since Google is initially a company which works with massive amounts of data – parallel computation and containerization is their strong area. So, if you are looking for a reliable solution for Big Data and hosting of heavy containerized applications, GCP might be the right partner to consider.
Also, Google has multiple transport network projects, has a strong cloud infrastructure management, and has its own fiber links all over the world, thus, from a connectivity perspective it must be a leader among all.
Despite the numerous advantages of its public cloud service, Google is notorious for closing some of their services without providing an alternative, it happened many times in the past and probably will happen again in future.
Compared to the competitors, GCP’s documentation sometimes is not as full and up to date.
The interest in Google Cloud Platform professionals is also much lower compared to the first two leaders – less than 600 openings for professionals with GCP skills on Glassdoor.
Conclusion
All three Cloud Service Providers discussed above are the heavy lifters that can satisfy almost any IaaS and PaaS demand, you can build very sophisticated IT infrastructures and establish a process of development and deployment of web applications of any scale using almost any modern technology and runtimes.
Almost any kind of modern Operating Systems, Container Management & Orchestration tools are available in all three Public Clouds: different distributions of Linux, Windows family Operating Systems, Docker and Kubernetes. Variety of pre-built, pre-configured solutions and business applications are available from a respective Marketplace of each Cloud Provider: AWS Marketplace, Azure Marketplace, Google Cloud Platform Marketplace.
If you are still deciding which Cloud Service Provider to choose for your company or project – you can always check in their respective service catalogs if they support a specific technology you need and calculate prices for most of the services using price calculators: AWS price calculator, Azure price calculator, GCP price calculator.
Of course, before making such an important decision, you might want to try all of the options – and it is possible by utilizing free tier subscription that allows to use almost all major products and services to get to know their capabilities and learn how to configure and use them: AWS free tier, Azure free tier, GCP free tier. And you do not have to stick to only one option, it makes sense not to rely only on one Service Provider and use a combination of them – for some services use one and for other purposes – another.
If you want to learn how to configure and use different Public Cloud Providers’ products and services – join our project-based courses where you will be able to implement real life scenarios using DevOps tools in Cloud environments.
Stay tuned for future posts in our blog.