AWS vs Azure vs GCP: Cloud Cost Comparison

Cloud computing is one of the hottest buzzwords in the IT field right now. The public largest cloud providers offer easy-to-set-up, highly scalable, and generally affordable benefits. With various largest cloud providers currently available in the market, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google GCP stand out proudly as the top contenders. They have already reported double-digit growth in cloud computing. However, one must acknowledge that these cutting-edge cloud solutions come at a certain cost. In this blog, we shall delve into AWS Vs Azure Vs GCP cloud cost comparison and see how they fare. But before we do, let’s understand the current state of the cloud market.

According to Flexera’s 2022 State of the Cloud report survey, 81 percent of companies operate heavy cloud infrastructure for AWS, while 80 percent of enterprises use the moderate cloud for Azure. Google is next, with 51 percent of companies running a heavy cloud landscape. The IT firm Flexera took 753 respondents’ opinions for this survey.

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Picking an integrated cloud vendor for your organization is not an easy task. One has to consider multiple factors some of which are unique needs, business goals, workloads, requirements, and others. One of the criteria is pricing. While cloud technology is all about making things cost-effective, it is tough to choose from AWS, Azure, and Google as pricing can vary widely by different plans, service choices, features, discount options, resource use, and more.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google (GCP), and Microsoft (Azure) are the most prominent public cloud providers market share, and they have a multi-billion dollar market share in the cloud computing arena. While all three provide similar vital functions, which public cloud provider best suits your organization on pricing the aspect? Our Veritis team will help you pick the right vendor for your platform.

Useful Link: Cloud Implementation Services: Strategy, Solutions and Benefits

Before going into an in-depth AWS Vs. Azure Vs. GCP cloud cost comparison, we will cover the estimated amount of each provider you can expect to pay as an average user. First, let’s have detailed info about each provider and AWS vs Azure vs GCP comparison.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

AWS came into the limelight in 2006 with services like Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). In 2009, it offered more services such as Elastic Block Store (EBS), Content Delivery Network (CDN), and Amazon CloudFront. Amazon currently offers more than 18,000 services which range from productivity tools to machine learning.

Amazon Web Services is the most standard storage service for object archiving, and it holds the biggest chunk of the current cloud provider security comparison market. It consists of a rich pair of tools like IoT, security, databases, management, analytics, and enterprise applications. On the other hand, AWS cloud server pricing Service S3 offers reliability, scalability, accessibility of information, and efficiency.

AWS market share dominates the global market with a revenue share of 32%, while Azure has a 21% market share, and GCP has an 8% market share.

Microsoft and Google compete with AWS by reducing their prices. AWS is one of the best cloud providers as their server pricing provides a pay-as-you-go model for its services as users pay what they consume for their service, and once they finish the services, there is no need to pay the additional amount or termination fees.

Inside AWS, the pricing format is complicated enough to make you seek a third-party app to manage all these services. However, for the minimum instance (for 2 virtual CPUs and 8 GB Ram), Amazon will cost you nearly USD 69/month, while the maximum instance (for 128 virtual CPUs and 3.84 TB Ram) will increase you nearly USD 3.97/hour.

Measurement specifications for Amazon S3

Storage volume: 200 GB per month

Data scan: 200 GB per month

Data return: 200 GB per month

PUT, COPY, POST, LIST requests: 10,000

GET, SELECT, and all other requests: 10,000

With the data mentioned above, we estimated the minimum total you will need to spend per month for your MVP (minimum viable product). The prices of Amazon S3 vary from one region to another. To put in perspective, the cost in some of the regions would be:  UK – USD 5.47, US East – USD 5.20, US West – USD 5.87. Meanwhile, all other places would average at USD 5.5. The cloud storage prices are USD 4.65 per month for all outlined locations.

Useful Link: Accelerate Business Growth with AWS Cloud Migration

Microsoft Azure

Azure provides a diverse range of storage cloud types that cater to multiple companies’ requirements. Data Lake Storage and Queue Storage are some of the best Azure options for big companies that need high data storage requirements. Bulk storage is ideal for companies opting for a large amount of unstructured data, while File storage is reliable and designed for most business requirements.

Azure pricing depends on multiple factors such as the level of management, the capacity required, and the location. Additionally, it offers a free tier, which allows free forever for some specific models and the free use of certain models for the first 12 months only.

Like AWS, Azure pricing offers the pay-as-you-go pricing model. It also provides an alternate option to pre-purchase its service which it calls a “Reserved Instance” (upfront commitment). This scenario requires commitment for 1 or 3 years for many of their products. With Reserved Instance, you can receive up to a 72 percent discount for Azure services. It also offers spot instances, allowing users to purchase VMs from Azure’s spare capacity at a low price.

The pay-as-you-go approach is charged on a per-second basis, and users can start or stop the service as per requirement and pay for what they use. On the other hand, the Reserved Instance is built for continuous use, and it is based on the entire month’s cost (730 hours) and pay as you go model also depends on 730 hours analysis as per the pricing calculator.

Therefore, when comparing both the models, 730 hours Reserved Instance vs 730 hours pay as you go, the Reserved Instance model looks best by estimating with the price calculator in the scenario that you need to use Azure cloud services for a year or more.

Microsoft Azure allows a wide range of services such as computing, networking, storage, and analytics. Therefore, its pricing model depends on various factors, including the capacity required, the location, the type of service, and the management level

Azure Pricing Model