Cloud Commoditisation vs Differentiation
AWS vs Google
I work mostly with AWS, but I recently I’ve started to get more acquainted with Google Cloud Platform with a different perspective. Let me be honest: I admire and like to work with AWS, where autonomous and self-service infrastructure was a market game-changer, but Google Cloud has a solid space in the industry and it is here to stay long.
If you compare the services of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, they pretty much offer the same service. Cloud is becoming a commodity. So, how Cloud providers differentiate one from another?
Note: I won’t talk much about Azure because I am still have PTSD from the past for using Microsoft products :-) . But I definitely see Azure being also a major player, specially for customers searching for a comfortable decision to adopt the Cloud.
I work mostly on DevOps and Infrastructure as Code, but with special focus on Data Science and Big Data. And being focused on Data, makes me see a clear difference between AWS and GCP.
Using some services from Google to handle Data, you can discover those differences:
- Cloud Datalab — to interact for data exploration, analysis, visualization and machine learning
- Cloud Dataproc — to run Spark and Hadoop
- Data Studio — to build data visuialization
- Cloud Vision API — to get insight from images
- Cloud Video Intelligence — to search and discover your media content on videos
- Cloud Translation API — to dynamically translate language pairs
- Firebase — to store real time database for mobile and web
and there are some others, check https://cloud.google.com/products/
But I want to highlight the most striking differences:
Data Focused services vs Infrastructure focused service
I consider AWS more focus on building infrastructure, where they excel, more than focus on data services, where here I think Google is ahead of the game. This is not a static situation, as AWS is also moving more and more into the Data Science and Analytics space.
User focused Services
I think that the fact that Google brings a past strong presence on services such as Chrome, Android, Google Play Store, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Apps and specially Google Analytics, everything which is related with individual users, aka people, rather than systems, aka machines, gives Google a very solid position on the Cloud space. If you already tried to develop solutions on Web or Mobile using the cloud, both with AWS and Google, let me know your opinion.
This is my view at this moment, which people might not agree, and I would also like to hear more about different opinions. Let me know what you think.
