Top 4 public cloud providers comparison in 2022: Azure vs AWS vs IBM vs Google

Last modified: 26th August, 2022

“CIOs are beyond the era of irrational exuberance of procuring cloud services and are being thoughtful in their choice of public cloud providers to drive specific, desired business and technology outcomes in their digital transformation journey.” With this, the world is quickly moving toward a future where public cloud services will be necessary. According to a recent research, in 2022, the end user spending on public cloud services is expected to reach around $500 billion, and nearly $600 billion in 2023.– Gartner1

Quick Links

• What is Public Cloud?
• Who should go for public cloud?
• Top Public cloud providers
• Best public cloud providers comparison: AWS v/s Azure v/s Google Cloud v/s IBM
• AWS vs Microsoft Azure vs Google Cloud Platform vs IBM: The public cloud prices’ comparison
  1. AWS cloud pricing reductions
  2. Azure cloud pricing reductions
  3. Google cloud pricing reductions
  4. IBM cloud pricing reductions

The demand for public cloud solutions is rising, and this translates to growing opportunities for public cloud providers. The top public cloud companies are enhancing their services and dropping the prices to better compete in the public cloud market.

What is Public Cloud? back to top

A public cloud, like Azure or AWS or Google, is a multi-tenant service based upon standard model of cloud computing, where a service provider or a third-party provider provides resources, like storage and applications to the general public over a network, like the internet.

Users have no control or visibility over the placement of the infrastructure. Services are either free, low cost or are on pay-per-usage model, so no wastage of resources is there. The set-up is easy and almost inexpensive as cost of applications, bandwidth and hardware are covered by the service provider.

It is not possible to select cache, hardware or storage performance (SAS/SATA) in the public cloud. Public cloud provider decides the hardware and network for the user. Also, PCI, SOX or HIPAA compliance cannot be provided in the public cloud as it is a multi-tenant environment, in which the user’s server shares the network devices, storage and hardware with multiple others in the cloud.

It is different from the private and hybrid cloud as private cloud is used by organizations for their own use, and hybrid cloud is a combination of public and private clouds.

The public cloud comprises a broad range of products and services related to the cloud, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software as a service (SaaS), and platform as a service (PaaS).

Who should go for the public cloud? back to top

Public Cloud is the obvious choice for:

• Developers and testers of application codes who fire up and tear down development servers regularly.
• Those who require scalability i.e., capability of adding compute resources at peak times.
• Those doing projects in collaboration with different teams.
• Those running webservers where data security is not a major concern.
• Those who have SaaS (Software as a Service) applications from vendors implementing proper security strategies.
• Those who are using PaaS (Platform as a Service) for doing ad-hoc software development projects.

Top Public cloud providers back to top

The public cloud market is majorly dominated by Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and Google. Experts predict that these face competitions only from one another and are not likely to be replaced by any other cloud service provider in the near future at least. The reason behind it is that competing in the public cloud needs very heavy investment, as well as masses of tech talent to support the underlying infrastructure.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been leading the public cloud market since it started services in 2006. According to Gartner, Amazon is the no.1 public cloud provider, holding 38.9% share in the IaaS market in 2021. Microsoft is holding the second position with 21.1% market share, followed by Alibaba Cloud (9.5%) and Google Cloud (7.1%).

““The IaaS market continues to grow unabated as cloud-native becomes the primary architecture for modern workloads,” said Sid Nag, VP analyst at Gartner. “Cloud supports the scalability and composability that advanced technologies and applications require, while also enabling enterprises to address emerging needs such as sovereignty, data integration and enhanced customer experience.”

Under the leadership of CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft is quickly gaining ground, thereby, shortening the gap between AWS and Azure. IBM has also reportedly recovered from the transformational phase and has been experiencing a growth in its revenue due to its cloud, security services and advanced solutions like IBM Watson.

On the other hand, the search engine giant Google too is able to maintain its position in the top public cloud providers list, with its Google Cloud Platform, by introducing discounts and adding features. Google also announced new Network Service Tiers – Premium and Standard to optimize performance and cost of using the public cloud.

Amazon, Microsoft and Google provide similar storage solutions but there are a number of differences in features and pricing of their public cloud services, which set them apart from the other. They either drop the prices of cloud instances, offer discounts, drop billing increments, or even provide per second billing options to stay one step ahead of each other.

Gartner named AWS, Microsoft, and Google among the leaders in Cloud Infrastructure & Platform Services Magic Quadrant 2021, while keeping Alibaba Cloud in Visionaries and Oracle, Tencent Cloud and IBM among Niche Players.

Best public cloud providers comparison: AWS v/s Azure v/s Google Cloud v/s IBMback to top

The comparison of AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM Cloud can be done on the basis of features, pricing, and solutions.

AWS vs Microsoft Azure vs Google Cloud Platform vs IBM: The public cloud prices’ comparison back to top

With the maturing of cloud computing, the prices of instances from cloud providers are also witnessing good reductions.

AWS cloud pricing reductions back to top

In addition to reducing prices on a regular basis, AWS also gives options to customers for optimizing their use of AWS. Reserved instances allow Amazon EC2 users for obtaining discounts when compared to on-demand pricing, in addition to capacity reservation when utilized in an Availability Zone.

The price cuts are so frequent that AWS has a blog category dedicated to price reduction!

As per the latest announcement by AWS, effective September 1, 2021 the prices have been reduced in 8 AWS regions.

Asia Pacific (Mumbai) – Up to 32%

Asia Pacific (Seoul) – Up to 32%

Asia Pacific (Singapore) – Up to 32%

Asia Pacific (Sydney) – Up to 32%

Canada (Central) – Up to 32%

Europe (Frankfurt) – Up to 32%

Europe (London) – Up to 32%

Europe (Paris) – Up to 32%

Note: This pricing change is not applicable to the Europe (Ireland), US-based commercial Regions, and US GovCloud Regions.

Below is the table showing before and after price reductions per 1,000 pages for processing the first 1 million monthly pages:

Moreover, the end-to-end latency for Textract’s asynchronous API operations has been reduced by as much 50%. This means that customers are now able to process their documents faster and achieve scale with increased productivity.

Azure cloud pricing reductions back to top

In addition to reducing prices on a regular basis, AWS also gives options to customers for optimizing their use of AWS. Reserved instances allow Amazon EC2 users for obtaining discounts when compared to on-demand pricing, in addition to capacity reservation when utilized in an Availability Zone.

The price cuts are so frequent that AWS has a blog category dedicated to price reduction!

In order to offer competitive pricing, Microsoft also has been lowering prices on a frequent basis. Microsoft has a price match promise according to which, it has a commitment to match Amazon Web Services prices for commodity services such as compute, storage and bandwidth.

In November 2017, Microsoft made Azure Reserved VM Instances (RIs) generally available on one or three-year term basis, claiming that customers can get up to 72% cost savings over pay-as-you-go pricing.

In January 2022, Microsoft announced price reductions by up to 33% on the DCsv2 and DCsv3-series VMs. This price reduction provides data controller benefits on a per physical core basis to its users with no premium compared to general purpose VMs. The updated pricing can be seen on the Microsoft pricing page.

Azure also offers billing per-second on container instances, for saving money and providing more transparency in billing.

Google cloud pricing reductions back to top

Google Cloud Platform is the cheapest option with it being 60% less expensive for compute as compared to other cloud services for various workloads, with no amount to be paid upfront. It has dropped its prices 3 times in last few years.

It provides per-second billing discounts, Sustained Usage Discounts (SUD) and Committed Use Discount (CUD) to the customers. Custom machine types help customers save up to 50% by matching the needed machine, eliminating over-provisioning and excess payment.

Google has publicly committed to passing along to customers any future price reductions Google achieves through technology-driven advancements in density, scale, power, and cooling. What Google provides is on-demand, real-time pricing. – ESG Labs Whitepaper

To align with other leading cloud service providers’ pricing strategies, Google has recently announced a list of pricing changes which will come into effect from October 1, 2022. Google has been analyzing its pricing structure with the goal of better aligning it towards customer needs and usage patterns. Through it, many customers will see a decrease in their bills. They can manage these price impacts by adjusting or modifying their implementations.

IBM cloud pricing reductions back to top

With the increase in competition, trust in cloud and cloud -native deployment, the market is getting more mature with time, leading to price cuts spiralling to other services linked to VMs, like storage, Database etc.

While last few years saw the leading giants introducing price cuts on storage as it became the next front for competition to grab the bigger cloud market share, experts from 451 Research predict price cuts in relational databases to be the next competitive arena for them.

IBM pioneered this concept, and in March 2017, cut the price of its object storage, with Google, Microsoft and AWS quickly following suit. IBM’s Cloud Object Storage Flex (Flex), works on a “pay as you use” model of storage tiers and potentially lowers the price by 53 percent as compared to AWS S3 IA and 75 percent as compared to Azure GRS Cool Tier. Later, IBM again reduced prices for IBM Cloud virtual servers by 35% in October 2018 and IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers by 17%, including 20TB of bandwidth, cost-free in 2019.  In 2020, IBM became the most cost-effective cloud vendor.

This leads to an overall reduction in the price of the cloud instance.

Given below are the pricing of AWS, Azure, IBM and Google instances as on August 2022.

Got anything that you would like to add, add in the comments section.

The information in this blog has been updated on 26^th August, 2022.

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Jyotsana Gupta

Jyotsana Gupta – the content and communication head, is an engineer by education and a writer at heart. In technical writing for 11 years, she makes complex topics interesting to the general audience. She loves going on long drives in her spare time.