7 Google Cloud Platform Advantages & Comparison With AWS And Azure

If you are a millennial or generation z, regardless you are an IT technician or not, you probably hear about Google Cloud. Throughout the years google have made several improvements in their platform. One of these infrastructures are the google cloud storage or google cloud platform.

In this post, I will review some of the top advantages to using Google Cloud Hosting and why most IT technicians consider it as currently the best computing solution on the market for deploying and operating applications on the web, in term of pricing, performance, stability, scalability, backups, and security.

As a bonus, at the end, I will compare Azure vs Google Cloud and AWS vs Google cloud to help you determine which one is best or more profitable for your business.

Here are 8 advantages of using google cloud platform:

1. Better Pricing Than Competitors

Google cloud platform makes it easy for startups and IT enterprises to cut hosting costs.  Google charges in minute-level increments, with a 10-minute minimum charge. Therefore, customers only pay for the compute time they use. There are also discounted prices for long-running workloads with no up-front commitment required.

Pricing innovations such as sustained-use and rightsizing discounts help qualified customers to get an average discount of 35% for many compute workloads. The google cloud storage costs about 21% less than AWS for online storage workloads. 

2. Private Global Fiber + Tiered Network

One thing that sets Google Cloud Hosting apart from the rest of the other players is that the network is one of the biggest in the world. Google Cloud’s own fiber-optic cables care laying under the ocean and the network speed also makes a difference in total cost. The high speed allows you to process more data in less time. By having such a large infrastructure and network, the computing prices become cheaper.

Google Cloud Platform also created its separate premium tier and standard tier networks, making it the 1^st major public cloud to offer a tiered cloud network. The Premium Tier deliver high speed traffic by taking “advantage of Google’s well-connected, high-bandwidth, low latency, highly reliable global backbone network, and over 100 points of presence (POPs) across the globe.” 

3. Live Migration of Virtual Machines

Live migration consists of moving an application or running a virtual machine between different physical machines while the client or application is live, that is without disconnection. Storage, memory, and network connectivity of the virtual machine are transferred from the original guest machine to the destination, from one server to another in live mode.

Another huge advantage of Google Cloud Services is the live migrations of Virtual Machines. AWS, Azure, and smaller providers like Digital Ocean offer this functionality too but cannot come closed to google in term of performance. The live migration feature allows the engineers at Google to better manage certain issues such as repairing, patching, and updating the software and hardware, without the need for customers to worry about machine reboots. 

4. Improved Performance

Google Compute Engine servers ensure automatic scalability. The Google Cloud machines easily handle 60k+ concurrent website visitors without any hiccups.

Google Compute Engine servers ensures automatic scalability; customers are not constrained to 2-6 CPUs per VPS as it is the case with other WordPress hosting providers.  With Google cloud, you can let your website container scale to as many CPUs needed when there is traffic increase or surge.

5. State of the Art Security

The 5^th important advantage of google cloud services is security. When you choose the Google Cloud Platform you get the benefit of a security model that has been built and tested for over 15 years, and currently secures Very Important global products and services such as Search and Gmail.

Some of Google Cloud Platform security features include:

• All data encrypted in transit between Google, the customers, and data centers;
• The layers of the Google application are authenticated and authorized.
• Google cloud helps improve the security of your data in transit as it means fewer hops across the public internet.

6. Dedication to Continued Expansion

Google has quickly built out their infrastructure for Google Cloud Platform. On September 29th, 2016, they disclosed the locations of new Google Cloud Regions which has dramatically decreased latency for Google Cloud Hosting customers in regions of Australia and South America. 

As of today October 23, 2020, Google has 24 Google Cloud Platform locations around the world. Here is the list:

1. Council Bluffs, Iowa, USA (us-central1)
2. Las Vegas, Nevada, USA (us-west4)
3. The Dalles, Oregon, USA (us-west1)
4. Los Angeles, California (us-west2)
5. Salt Lake City, USA (us-west3)
6. Moncks Corner, South Carolina, USA (us-east1)
7. Ashburn, Virginia, USA (us-east4)
8. Montréal, Canada (northamerica-northeast1)
9. Sydney, Australia (australia-southeast1)
10. Ghislain, Belgium (europe-west1)
11. Changhua County, Taiwan (asia-east1)
12. São Paulo, Brazil (southamerica-east1)
13. London, UK (europe-west2)
14. Frankfurt, Germany (europe-west3)
15. Jurong West, Singapore (asia-southeast1)
16. Tokyo, Japan (asia-northeast1)
17. Mumbai, India (asia-south1)
18. Eemshaven, Netherlands (europe-west4)
19. Hamina, Finland (europe-north1)
20. Hong Kong (asia-east2)
21. Zürich, Switzerland (europe-west6)
22. Osaka, Japan (asia-northeast2)
23. Seoul, South Korea (asia-northeast3)
24. Jakarta, Indonesia (asia-southeast2) 

7. Redundant Backups

Google Cloud Storage is built for 99.99% durability and has 4 different types of storage: nearline, regional storage, Coldline storage, and multi-regional storage. They store data needlessly, with automatic checksums in order to ensure safety and integrity of the data.

Google Cloud storage stores your data redundantly in at least two regions within the multi-regional locations. The service ensures customers will never lose their data, even in the case of a disaster.

8. Largest Provider in the world

There are a lot of advantages when it comes to using the Google Cloud Platform. Aside from it is cheaper from other services, you also benefit from one of the largest networks in the world. That is, less latency and more accurate compute prices for you.

All these advantages are equipped with state of the reliable security and high performance capable of handling hundreds of thousands of concurrent connections. As a customer, you have a platform that can set your business up for long-term success.

Google Cloud vs AWS

With the Google Cloud Platform, you get more Input/output operations per second (IOPS) for cheaper cost, less than 1/3 of the AWS price. IPOS is an input/output performance measurement which allows to measure storage system performance.

According to an article published on kinsta.com, customers can save more than $1000 per month using the Google cloud platform. For instance, refer to this configuration below, you would pay Google Cloud storage $470.64 per month for the same service that you would cost you $1,102.50 per month, with 3-year contract, on AWS. That’s more than one thousand in saving.

Google Cloud vs Azure

Unlike Google that charges per second, Azure offers pay-per-minute billing, which let users save more on their service. Google also offers various discounts which are not available on the Azure platform. In addition, to use Azure, you have to attach premium SSD storage to get similar persistent network-attached storage.

But again, according to kinsta.com, you can save more than $1000 per month. Google cloud storage would cost you about 1/3 of the Azure cost. As shows the configuration below, Azure users pay $1,602.68 monthly for a similar service that would cost them just $532.82 per month on the google cloud platform (GCP)

Do you have any question or suggestion regarding Google Cloud Storage? kindly comment below. I do my best to answer all serious questions.