Cloud wars: Why organizations choose Google Cloud over its rivals

What was once considered the sign of a business’s superiority, “Being in the clouds” is a concept that has now become mandatory for every company, irrespective of the business size. With the amount of data that organizations are working with today along with the output of the everyday processes, it becomes impossible to contain these numbers with the in-house servers. And this is where cloud service providers come into the picture.

There are a number of cloud service providers around the globe that are being utilized by businesses to take their operations away from on-premises servers to hosting them in the cloud. While the number of these services has increased manifold, there are only a few that have emerged as the best cloud service providers.

Cloud computing service industry leaders

Google Cloud

Google through its cloud platform offers three options — Platform as a Service, serverless computing, and Infrastructure as a Service. Between these three options, businesses can pick from a whole range of different services such as compute, machine learning, data analytics, and storage.

Amazon Web Service

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the most popular cloud service platform in the world. It is being used by major brands and companies of all sizes for hosting and for a range of different purposes like serverless computing, storage, and running containerized applications.

Microsoft Azure

Earlier known as Windows Azure, Microsoft Azure offers a range of different cloud services such as compute, networking, analytics, storage, and more. Businesses can opt for one of these services for the development and scaling of new applications in the public cloud.

Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, is continuously making investments to make its cloud services more innovative and wholesome for businesses. This is being done in the hope to bridge the gap between Google Cloud’s current state and its growth potential.

The result of these efforts has led to a greater market adoption rate, which in return, is now generating $1 billion in quarterly revenue. This is significant considering Google has been in the cloud computing race for much less time than the incumbent leader AWS. Amazon Web Services rakes in about $6 billion per quarter — still way ahead of Google Cloud, but from market trends, Google Cloud seems to be the fastest growing cloud platform today.

Beside Innovation and the growth tangent that Google Cloud is on, there are a number of factors that differentiate and place Google Cloud ahead of the other service providers in the industry.

What makes Google Cloud Platform different?

Billing per second

Google Cloud charges customers for usage of its compute engine instances in one-second increments having a one-minute minimum. And because of this, the businesses get to save a good amount of money from when they are not using the compute engine. This is true if you run short-term workloads that require quick boot up and shut down of instances. If you’re running a dynamic app, Google Cloud is the way to go because of its more granular pricing model.

Big Data

Google’s Big Data innovations such as Bigtable and MapReduce along with the next-gen frameworks for data warehousing, advanced machine learning, and visual analytics give it an edge in data processing and analytics. Google provides many data analysis tools that require no maintenance and include powerful processing features.

User-friendly interface

I wrote about this here at TechGenix: Google Cloud is the best place to be if you’re getting started with cloud computing. It’s CloudShell, great tutorials, clear communication, and well-integrated services make it a pleasure to use, and it greatly reduces the time it takes to get started.

Kubernetes leadership

Google is the creator of Kubernetes, the container management platform that has taken the world of enterprise IT by storm. Built on Google’s large-scale operations in-house, Kubernetes is the umbrella platform under which every other IT tool is finding a place today. It’s no surprise that Kubernetes is a first-class citizen on the Google Cloud platform. Azure has been investing in this area as well recently, but Google has the first-mover advantage here and is a key reason why many organizations are turning to Google to run their Kubernetes workloads in the cloud.

These differentiators and the number of yearly investments that the tech giant is making to build Google Cloud as a powerhouse have been reasons enough for a number of businesses switching their cloud partnership to the Google Cloud Platform.

While companies falling in the SMBs and startups category are already favoring Google Cloud because of the familiarity that they have with Google products, a number of established brands such as Twitter, Shopify, Etsy, and even the tech giant’s arch rival, Apple have made a switch to Google Cloud. Let’s discuss the reasons for their choice.

Twitter

Twitter has moved its Hadoop clusters and cold storage to Google Cloud, which the brand believes will enhance the productivity and developer experience of their engineering teams that are working with the data platform.

In a recent blog post, Twitter listed a series of benefits that they expect to achieve through this collaboration, including, greater flexibility, fast capacity provisioning, better security, and enhanced capability of disaster recovery. Twitter has been a poster child for modern web-scale development. This move will be watched and even emulated by many smaller startups that look to engineering teams like the one at Twitter for inspiration and direction in architecting their tech stack.

Shopify

After developing and running its own commerce cloud for 12 years, Shopify moved to Google Cloud Platform because of their shared values of “open source, security, performance, and scale.”

In their blog post, Shopify mentioned that they’ve already transitioned over 50 percent of their resources from their private datacenters to Google Cloud. They also have seen great results with reduced downtimes and a greater focus on Kubernetes following Google’s lead. Shopify is the leading e-commerce platform, and this move will benefit many small and medium-sized e-commerce companies. For e-commerce companies in the space, they may want to take note of this as a major development and follow suit if they still operate on private servers.

Etsy

Etsy, another e-commerce bigwig, had a similar announcement to make. In December 2017, Etsy selected Google Cloud as the public cloud provider to power the brand’s global services that help connects millions of people across the globe. The primary reason why Etsy moved to Google Cloud Platform, as shared by them through a news release, was to take advantage of the Analytics and Machine Learning features that Google Cloud is known for. For an established e-commerce company like Etsy, machine learning and a smarter shopping experience are the next frontiers. Having a capable cloud platform to enable this focus is essential.

Never underestimate the power of Google

With an intense focus on technologies like Kubernetes and machine learning, Google Cloud is all out to change the way cloud computing happens. Though not the first in the cloud provider space, Google has a reputation of disrupting any ecosystem it enters. Think Gmail, Chrome, Android, and G Suite — these were all late to the party but more than made up for the lost time by becoming the top products and platforms in their respective space. While it will take some time for Google Cloud to outperform the competition that is prevalent in the cloud market today, it’s not too late to see a shakeup in the pecking order as Google Cloud reaches for the skies.