Earlier, it used to be considered that public cloud marathon was run by only two competitors (AWS & Azure) till Google Cloud came in as a lateral entry. It has been sprinting to cover the distance ever since.
Google’s cloud ambition jumpstarted when the global market leaders such as HSBC, Twitter, PayPal, Bloomberg and 20th Century Fox made ‘the android creator’ their preferred public cloud provider.
According to Gartner, “In comparison to AWS and Azure, Google Cloud might be the smallest one but its growth rate accelerated way more than its counterparts.”
In 2016, Google clocked $500 m of IaaS public cloud sales which gave them 2.3% of the market share. However, this was overlooked by the share of AWS and Azure i.e 44% and 7.1% respectively. On the contrary, Google has a growth of 100% which is way ahead of its competitors.
Google Cloud is undoubtedly thriving at an immense pace but still, there is a lack of conviction in its ability to catch and keep up with Amazon and Microsoft. However, there are a few reasons because of which cloud analysts believe Google cloud is going to be successful.
Google Cloud outpacing AWS and Microsoft Azure in terms of growth
Technical giants never want to be left out of the race for being the leader of most demanding technologies. Cloud computing is surely one of them. And choosing the best suitable cloud is the first towards getting ahead in the game.
Google has come a long way starting from supporting open source projects to its own cloud platform. Let’s take a look at how GCP stands out from other CSPs with its major announcements that can make a difference in the cloud computing landscape in forthcoming years.
Anthos: Google Cloud Platform
As per the latest announcements:
- For the developers, Google Anthos provides a container management platform based on Kubernetes. Developers can use this platform for the quick and easy build-up and development of existing container-based applications and microservices-based architectures.
- For operations, Anthos provides centralized and efficient deployment and management of clusters; allowing the enterprise to quickly check and manage the infrastructure that is compliant with all the corporate standards.
- With Anthos you have the ability to enforce the security standards on clusters, deployed applications, and even the workflow of configuration management that takes the configuration-as-a-code approach and centralized management into practice.
Offer better pricing than competitors
While using google cloud you only need to pay for the compute time you use at minute-level pricing (with the minimum of 10-minute charge). Moreover, it gives you big discounts on the prices of workload for running a long period of time with no upfront commitment required. It means, running a virtual machine even for a month and you get discounts. This makes it ideal for startups and IT companies to cut costs.
On the other hand, GCP’s competitors like AWS requires a long term commitment with a reserved instance to be eligible for discount. On the other hand, Azure only offers a 5% discount on advance payment of 12 months.
Live Migration
Google offers live migration with its compute engine to keep your instances running; even when a host server is on maintenance, such as software or hardware update. Live Migration of compute engine means your running instances migrate to another host in the same zone; instead of requiring to reboot your VMs. This enables GCP to perform maintenance that is integral for the protection and the reliability of infrastructure without interrupting any of your VMs.
Big Data and Artificial Intelligent (AI) development
For Google Cloud Platform, Machine Learning and AI are their two fortresses. Google is a leader in AI development because of TensorFlow, an open source software library to build machine learning application. The TensorFlow library is well known and recommended library. A testament to its popularity is that TensorFlow support has been added by AWS recently.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that AWS has been holding the badge of cloud leaders since a few years now; and with Microsoft Azure’s attempt of trying to catch up with them, GCP has also begun to reveal their trump cards. The reason is that the cloud holds the potential for product innovation and business transformation; due to the biggest digital disruption provided by cloud in the last two decades.
Google has never been an underdog even with little market share; because of the loyal customer portfolio that includes leaders in the different market segments. It will be interesting to see how rapidly Google can add more services to its cloud umbrella.