Launched in 2011, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has had to do some catching up to market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS), its most direct competitor as a purer cloud play. But Google had no experience servicing large enterprise IT, and so has spent several years playing catchup.
Rather than be an AWS clone, GCP has become a unique services outfit that providing massive-scale services, including artificial intelligence and machine learning. GCP’s advantages today include lower pricing via a sustained-usage discount, a much faster network connecting its datacenters, live migration of virtual machines, massive scale and availability zones, and a variety of redundant backups for always-available storage. What GCP doesn’t offer is the wealth of tools and add-ons that AWS does in its bid to address every use case.