Ask an Expert: How to Choose The Right Cloud Provider

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There are multiple points and differences between the Big 3 cloud providers (AWS, GCP and Azure) in functionality, costs, and other areas. It’s also challenging to know what challenges you’ll encounter until you go down that path. So it pays to do your research upfront. But what factors should you consider? A few essential areas to focus on are:

1. Cost
2. Scalability
3. Availability
4. Automation
5. Ease of Deployment
6. Security

For each of these factors, it can be arduous for companies to see the value differentiation between vendors. For example, some companies may already have significant infrastructure invested in Microsoft, and so using Azure becomes the obvious choice. However, it’s important to understand this choice even when it’s seemingly apparent to make sure you aren’t missing out on valuable functionality or savings.

Decision Guidance

Before examining cost, scalability and availability, it’s key to decide upfront if you want to be cloud-agnostic or cloud-native. Lots of companies start with the aspiration of being cloud-agnostic and use tools like Kubernetes. But invariably, those companies end up needing to augment Kubernetes with native services such as databases and data storage, which are more difficult to abstract. Let’s dive into the three factors we’ll focus on this time: cost, scalability and availability.

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The winner here is AWS in the areas of cost, availability and scalability. There are some exceptions to this, of course. Some businesses have good reason to go with GCP or Azure, and we dive into those scenarios a bit deeper in our video. 

To learn more about the cost, availability and scalability factors when choosing between AWS, Azure and GCP, watch the full video. Stay tuned for our next episode, where James and John will cover automation, ease of deployment and security. 

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