Cloud provider comparison: What matters for your first infrastructure?

Introduction

Choosing the right cloud provider is a critical decision for any business. With cloud adoption accelerating across industries, selecting the best-fit impacts not just costs, but also scalability, security, and overall operational efficiency. While the major providers—AWS, Azure, and GCP—offer similar core services, they differ in usability, pricing structures, regional availability, and compliance offerings.

In this article, we won’t push you toward a particular choice. Instead, we’d like to highlight some key factors to consider when evaluating cloud providers, helping you make an informed decision based on your business needs. Since cloud adoption is often a long-term commitment, understanding these aspects beforehand can save you time, effort, and costly migrations.

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Cloud accessibility & ease of use

AWS offers over 200 services, making it a comprehensive and complex provider that requires deep technical expertise. Azure, while well integrated with Microsoft products, has a UI that some find unintuitive compared to its competitors. GCP, on the other hand, is often praised for its clean interface and structured approach, making navigation easier for many users.

Since Azure (2010) and GCP (2008) started later than AWS (2002), they had the advantage of seeing the pitfalls AWS had to go through, and this allowed them to build more user-friendly services from scratch.

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Market share

As of Q4 2024, Amazon Web Service (AWS) is in the leading position of global market share with 30%. Microsoft Azure is second with a growing share of 21% and is followed by Google Cloud Platform at 12%. Even though AWS is dominating the market, both Microsoft and Google have reported higher year-on-year growth rates - this reflects shifting competitive dynamics. The rest of the market is shared among Alibaba Cloud, Oracle, and IBM Cloud ranging from 2-4%.

Organization structure

Each provider has a different logical grouping of resources. If the organization is set up well, it can be used effectively and serve its purpose while your business scales.

GCP has a directory-based approach, where the root resource is Organization. Within this Organization, you can manage Folders, containing more Folders or Projects (base-building resources in your organization, which contain particular resources).

AWS has Organization root which serves as your management account, then you have Organization Units (OU) which contain member accounts or can also nest another OU. Member accounts are places where you manage your resources.

In Azure the root object is Tenant underneath that is the Organization group, which contains Subscriptions. Each Subscription can contain one or more Resource groups, which then hold the particular resources.

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User management

Azure has a strong advantage in Azure Active Directory, which is very commonly adopted among corporations. Google has also Google Workspace, which also has nice integration to the full suite of productivity and collaboration tools.

AWS is slightly lacking in this regard, where it doesn’t have its own identity provider, however you are still able to configure identity access management for each resource as well as in other cloud providers.

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Regions support

When choosing the right provider, regions, and locations are another thing to keep in mind. A region is a collection of zones. Zones are isolated data centers within a region that have high-bandwidth, low-latency network connections to other zones in the same region.

When choosing the region for your deployment, consider your userbase and their location, to make sure the provider has a region in that area. This will help you to keep your latency to a minimum. If you have multiple regions close to your user base, you can compare their pricing. 

For example in GCP, the price for a Compute Engine n2-standard-8 instance (vCPUs: 8, RAM: 32 GiB) is $398 / month in Zurich, while in Finland the price is $313. If you have 10 of them, the total you can save is roughly $850 each month.

Beyond performance, regional selection also affects compliance. Many businesses must ensure data residency within specific countries due to regulations like GDPR or HIPAA, making region selection a crucial factor in cloud adoption.

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Provider products

Before choosing a cloud provider it is important to understand what services you will need and have their basic understanding. If you only need Kubernetes and self-host other services such as databases inside of the cluster, then choosing the provider based on their products isn’t that important, as all the providers have mostly similar Kubernetes distributions.

Essentially all of the main providers have a service for SQL and NoSQL databases, object storage, some simple container service, serverless functions, and secret managers. You can also store your container images.

It’s safe to say that generally the providers are very similar when it comes to the core services, however the services have minor differences when compared to each other.

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Managed Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open-source platform for orchestrating container applications. Most of the providers' main product is managed Kubernetes, where the provider takes away the complexity behind maintaining a running instance. 

Overall, the main components and usage of Kubernetes across providers are the same, however, there are some differences. While AWS EKS benefits from Karpenter for dynamic scaling, GCP’s GKE is widely regarded for its auto-scaling and seamless integration with other Google services. Azure’s AKS, on the other hand, integrates deeply with Azure DevOps, making it an attractive choice for enterprises already using Microsoft tools. Comparing the Kubernetes providers could be an article on its own and we’ll for sure get to it in one of the future articles. 

The pricing model is usually the same for all providers, where you pay for the control plane of Kubernetes and then you pay for the instances as regular instances if used as standalone. The price for the control plane is around $73 per month.

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Cloud compliance

When adopting cloud computing, it may, depending on the nature of your cloud environments, bring unique challenges you are going to face. Some of the key challenges are data residency, security approaches, certifications, and attestations. On top of that, you’ll need continuous compliance monitoring, as compliance is not a one-time task but it requires ongoing monitoring and adaptation. 

All major providers offer built-in compliance tools—AWS Artifact, Azure Compliance Manager, and Google’s Assured Workloads—to help businesses meet regulatory requirements with less overhead.

As already mentioned above, some of the common cloud regulations and standards are GDPR, ISO 27000 family, or PCI DSS.

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Wrap up

Each provider has trade-offs. A company with deep AWS expertise might lean towards AWS, while those using Microsoft products may benefit from Azure’s ecosystem. GCP may be slightly more expensive, however, it does a good job of abstracting away the cloud complexity and provides a friendly UI.

Evaluating factors like compliance, ease of use, and cost-effectiveness can guide your choice. Ultimately, your decision should align with your business needs, technical capabilities, and long-term goals.