GCP VS.

AWS
Why Google is the more open, secure & reliable
cloud

SADA / GCP vs. AWS / © 2020 SADA. All Rights

Reserved.
Table of contents

3. / Executive summary

4. / Introduction

5. / GCP vs. AW S Overview

11 / What makes GCP the superior

option?
 Executive summary
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is not just an
alternative to AWS, but for many use cases, it is a
far superior choice. GCP is more cost-effective1 and
open2 than AWS and possesses deep expertise in
cybersecurity, artificial intelligence (AI)/machine
learning (ML), and container management.

“We chose Google Cloud Platform because it was

the most reliable, cost-effective, and automated
cloud solution available,” says Tim Morrow, CTO at
TVG Network. “We get better security, strong
compliance,
and the peace of mind that when the biggest race
day rolls around, we won’t have any downtime.”3

1
https://services.google.com/fh/files/events/esg_economic_validation_migrating_to_google_bigquery.pdf
2
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/open-source/bringing-the-best-of-open-source-to-google-cloud-customers
3
https://sada.com/blog/customers/sada-systems-helps-tvg-network-scale-with-google-cloud-platform/
3
 Only a few years ago, enterprises were reluctant to
Introductio migrate to the cloud. Now, cloud is a mainstream
technology, multicloud is the wave of the future, and

n hybrid environments are gaining in popularity. Flexera’s

State of the Cloud 2019 survey4 found that:

‐ 94% of enterprises use cloud, and 31% say

that public cloud is their #1 priority
‐ Multi-cloud is by far the preferred strategy; 84%
of
enterprises run multiple clouds
‐ 58% of enterprises run hybrid environments, up
from
51% the year prior

Organizations now find themselves tasked with

evaluating and selecting not just one but multiple
public cloud providers, then integrating and
maintaining them, along with on-prem infrastructure.

4
https://www.flexera.com/blog/cloud/2019/02/cloud-computing-trends-2019-state-of-the-cloud-survey/
4
GCP vs. AWS
/ Overview
Launched in 2006, AWS was one of the first pay-
as-you-go cloud computing models to be offered
to the general public. Google launched GCP in
2008. Comparisons of AWS and GCP frequently
claim that public cloud is a “new” venture for
Google. While it’s true that AWS has been selling
cloud services to the general public for longer,
Google is not “new” to the cloud. In fact, Google’s
cloud infrastructure predates Amazon’s.

Google developed Borg, the predecessor to

Kubernetes, in about 2003 or 2004, 5 and used it to
manage production containers internally before
introducing
the open-source Kubernetes in 2014 6 and officially
releasing it in 2015. 7 The company needed a highly
secure and massively scalable platform for its
ambitious internal projects, including Google Search,
Maps, AdSense, and Gmail. At the time, no other
company was doing what Google was doing -- and
certainly not on the same scale -- so Google had to
build its own solution! GCP simply allows other
enterprises to take advantage of the same secure,
time-tested, and highly optimized cloud infrastructure
that Google has relied upon for years.

5
https://blog.risingstack.com/the-history-of-kubernetes/
6
Ibid.
7
https://kubernetes.io/blog/2015/04/borg-predecessor-to-kubernetes/

5
Service comparison
Both GCP and AWS offer a core set of services for compute, storage, networking, and databases. Higher-level services, such
as machine learning and application services, are built atop these core features:

‐ Compute: Google Compute Engine and Google App Engine | Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
‐ Storage: Google Cloud Storage | Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
‐ Networking: Google Virtual Private Cloud | Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
‐ Databases: Google Cloud SQL, Google Cloud Firestore, and Google Cloud Bigtable | Amazon Relational Database Service
(RDS) and Amazon DynamoDB

This table provides a side-by-side comparison with more detail:

Service category Service AWS Google Cloud

Compute Amazon Elastic Compute Compute

IaaS Engine
Cloud
PaaS AWS Elastic Beanstalk App
Engine

Containers Amazon Elastic Container Google Kubernetes Engine

Containers without AW S Fargate Cloud

Run infrastructure

FaaS AW S Lambda Cloud Functions

Managed batch computing AW S Batch N/A

6
Service comparison
Service category Service AWS Google Cloud

Network Virtual networks Amazon Virtual Private Cloud Virtual Private Cloud

Load balancer Elastic Load Balancer Cloud Load Balancing

Dedicated interconnect Direct Connect Cloud Interconnect

Domains and DNS Amazon Route 53 Google Domains, Clou

d DNS

CDN Amazon CloudFront Cloud CDN

Storage Object storage Amazon Simple Storage Cloud Storage

Service

Block storage Amazon Elastic Block Store Persistent Disk

Reduced-availability storage Amazon S3 Standard- Cloud Storage Nearline and

Infrequent Access, Amazon Cloud Storage Coldline
S3 One Zone-Infrequent
Access

Archival storage Amazon Glacier Cloud Storage Archive

File storage Amazon Elastic File System Filestore

7
Service comparison
Service category Service AWS Google Cloud

Database RDBMS Amazon Relational Database Cloud SQL, Cloud Spanner

Service, Amazon Aurora

NoSQL: Key-value Amazon DynamoDB Firestore, Cloud Bigtable

NoSQL: Indexed Amazon SimpleDB Firestore

Big data & analytics Batch data processing Amazon Elastic MapReduce, Dataproc, Dataflow
AWS Batch

Stream data processing Amazon Kinesis Dataflow

Stream data ingest Amazon Kinesis Pub/Sub

Analytics Amazon Redshift, Amazon BigQuery

Athena

Workflow orchestration Amazon Data Pipeline, AWS Cloud Composer

Glue

Application services Messaging Amazon Simple Pub/Sub

Notification Service,
Amazon Simple Queueing
Service

8
Service comparison
Service category Service AWS Google Cloud

Management services Monitoring Amazon CloudWatch Stackdriver Monitoring

Logging Amazon CloudWatch Logs Stackdriver Logging

Deployment AWS CloudFormation Cloud Deployment Manager

“Google definitely had the right solution. At Zynga,

our products generated so much demand that
we had to scale out our infrastructure to match
all Facebook's. AWS was too piecemeal to do
that effectively. Google has 'recipes' for
everything we need to do at scale with data.”8
Tom Bollich
CTO, Madhive (and former founding team member of Zynga)

8
https://sada.com/blog/customers/sada-helps-madhive-deliver-blockchain-ad-tech-with-privacy-by-design/

9
Service comparison
Service category Service AWS Google Cloud

Machine learning Speech Amazon Transcribe Speech-to-Text

Vision Amazon Rekognition Cloud Vision

Natural language processing Amazon Comprehend Cloud Natural Language API

Translation Amazon Translate Cloud Translation

Conversational interface Amazon Lex Dialogflow

Enterprise Edition

Video intelligence Amazon Rekognition Video Video Intelligence API

Auto-generated models N/A AutoML (beta)

Fully managed ML Amazon SageMaker AI Platform

10
What makes GCP
the superior option?
Cost savings through pricing
innovations
AWS bills are notoriously complicated and filled with hidden
costs, such as unused or underutilized EC2 instances.9 Ever-
increasing AWS bills were a major reason why ME.ME, a search
engine for memes, switched from AWS to GCP. Reaching out to
AWS didn’t help the company bring down its tab. “I never spoke
to anyone
on the phone, just through online chat, and no one on their side
ever told us how to cut costs,” says Jim Hefner, ME.ME’s CTO.10 In
contrast, GCP strives to give users as much visibility into their
cloud costs as possible, along with easy-to-use cost optimization
tools that help users keep spending under control.11

On average, GCP customers can save 21% over AWS on online

storage workloads; additionally, GCP offers automated right-
sizing recommendations, sustained-use discounts, and other
cost-saving tools to save users an average of 35% on compute
workloads.12

9
https://www.itproportal.com/features/7-hidden-aws-costs-that-could-be-killing-your-budget/
10
https://sada.com/blog/customers/sada-helps-me-me-use-google-cloud-platform-to-organize-the-worlds-memes/
11
https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/pricing/shining-a-light-on-your-costs-new-billing-features-from-google-cloud
12
https://cloud.google.com/pricing/

11
Sustained use discounts Big savings with microservices

Sustained use discounts are a feature unique to GCP. GCP allows for the abstraction of cloud
These discounts, which are based on a sliding scale technologies from memory-sucking virtual
according to percentage usage, are automatically machines to modern platforms that facilitate “just
applied each month. They do not require prepayments right” microservices that significantly reduce
or commitments, and users may combine non- wasted cloud spend. As an example, instead of
overlapping instances (“inferred instances”) to maximize running 400 virtual machines, each with 75%
their discount.13 GCP users can save up to 30% on utilization (the equivalent of 100 of
workloads that run for a significant portion of the billing those VMs going unused), GCP users can deploy
month on Compute Engine and Cloud SQL.14 4000 Docker containers running in perfect
orchestration via Google Kubernetes Engine, each
Fixed-price preemptible virtual machines with 95% utilization.

GCP’s preemptible VMs (PVMs) let users save up to Significantly lower TCO for EDWs
79% on workloads that can be interrupted, such as
data mining and data processing.15 Unlike AWS Spot Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) conducted a three-
Instances, which work on a dynamic pricing model, year total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) study that
GCP PVMs are fixed-price, so organizations can compared upgrading an on-premises enterprise data
better predict their costs. warehouse (EDW) solution from a leading vendor,
migrating to a cloud-based solution provided by the
Custom machine types vendor on AWS, or redesigning and migrating to
Google BigQuery. In the end, Google was the clear
GCP users can choose any configuration of CPU and w inner; ESG found an overall three-year cost
memory to save up to 48% compared to fixed reduction of 52% compared to remaining on-
machine types from other cloud providers.16 premises, along with a 41% reduction compared to
using the vendor’s solution on AWS.17

13
https://www.parkmycloud.com/aws-versus-google-cloud-pricing-comparison/ 17
Ibid.
14
Ibid.
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid.

12
Get an accurate comparison of your cloud spend

A line-by-line comparison of cloud providers’

costs across all services is a highly complex
undertaking that is outside the scope of this
paper. All vendors use different terminology to
describe their
products, instance types, and pricing plans. Additionally,
variables such as load balancing, networking, on-
demand pricing, and committed-use discounts can
significantly impact costs.

Organizations can generate high-level estimates using

Google’s online pricing calculator.18 However, a far
more efficient and accurate method is to use the free
CloudPhysics tool,19 which assesses organizations’
current infrastructure, then provides a side-by-side
comparison of their current spend with what they
would be spending on GCP. In addition to AW S, this
tool also works with Azure and on-prem hardware.

18
https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/
19
https://info.sada.com/sada-systems-free-cloudphysics-assessment

13
Simpler, more flexible
service
usage tracking
GCP and AWS organize service& billing
usage tracking and billing quite
differently. AWS tracks all usage according to user account; any
services utilized are billed to the account used to sign up for AWS.
Users can also create billing accounts, then create sub-accounts
whose usage rolls up to them. Tracking who is responsible for what
portion of the bill can get quite complicated when dealing with
multiple divisions, project teams, and other groups.

Conversely, GCP organizes service usage and billing according to

project, not user account. Users can create multiple and completely
separate projects under the same account. Billing is accomplished
through billing accounts, and individual billing accounts can be linked
to one or more projects. This model allows enterprises to easily
create dedicated project spaces for separate divisions, locations, or
other groups within a company, with all charges for that group billed
on one invoice.

The ability to create siloed project spaces is also helpful when

conducting testing. A user can create a test project, then delete it
when they’re finished, ensuring that all the resources created for
the test are also deleted without impacting other projects.

Game developer FlowPlay appreciates the flexibility of paying for

computing power instead of hardware: “AWS requires customers
to choose a specific server configuration when buying a long-
term contract,” explains Douglas Pearson, Flowplay’s Co-Founder
and CTO. “With GCP, instead of renting a specific server, we
buy
computing power. This allows us to experiment with servers, drives,
configurations, and RAM to optimize performance. We couldn’t
have done that as easily with AWS.”20
14
20
https://sada.com/blog/customers/flowplay/
 Robust artificial intelligence/
machine learning tools
AI/ML capabilities are a major factor when choosing a public cloud
provider. IDC predicts that by 2022, 75% of enterprises will be
using AI solutions to analyze data and glean actionable, innovation-
driving business insights.21

GCP’s AI/ML and data analytics capabilities were a big selling point
for Northgate Market, an ethnic foods grocery chain. “Those are core
strengths for Google that AWS doesn’t have,” says Harrison Lewis,
Northgate’s Chief Information and Privacy Officer. “We knew we
wanted to build a data lake on BigQuery to manage our customer
data; that was an important feature for us.”22

Startup food delivery platform FoodJets is making heavy use of

GCP’s ML features to enhance their end users’ experience. “We’re
using AutoML because we don’t have data scientists on our team.
We can have our developers train models, then use trial and error to
refine them. It’s very powerful and easy to use,” explains CTO Veer
Singh.23

Google has long been committed to research in AI/ML. Google’s

research division, Google AI, employs a team of engineers devoted to
using AI/ML to solve both internal business problems and big-picture
societal issues. Its engineers frequently author academic research
papers to publicly share their findings, and the AI/ML tools available
in GCP are the same as those Google uses in-house.24

21
https://www.forbes.com/sites/gilpress/2019/11/22/top-artificial-intelligence-ai-predictions-for-2020-from-idc-and-
forrester/#349850b6315a
22

https://sada.com/blog/customers/sada-gcp-help-northgate-market-deliver-authentic-value-to-underserved-communitie
s/
23
https://sada.com/blog/customers/foodjets-drives-innovation-with-google-cloud-sada/ 15
24
https://www.theverge.com/2016/4/21/11482576/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-cloud-ai-future
 ME.ME, which serves billions of individual memes TensorFlow
each month, is using GCP’s ML tools for adult content
detection and optical character recognition (OCR), Google developed TensorFlow, a very popular
and the company has found the speed and accuracy software library for building ML applications, for
to be very high. “The OCR is probably the best we’ve internal use before releasing it as open-source.29
ever SageMaker, AWS’ ML platform, is proprietary
used, and the computer vision and tagging features software.
are also helpful,” notes Jim Hefner, CTO.25
While AWS supports TensorFlow, GCP users are able
“We want users to find everything fast,” adds Shane to access new versions of the library weeks before
Walker, CEO of ME.ME, “which means automating they’re made available on AW S. GCP also offers
moderation and leveraging machine learning at the TensorFlow Enterprise, a fully managed solution that
scale of Google. We use a lot of cutting-edge Google was developed to address the unique needs of AI-
tech that other sites don’t, which enables us to go enabled businesses. In addition to enterprise-grade
fast and do it all with a small team. Google Cloud is performance, and managed services for AI workloads,
giving us a huge competitive advantage.”26 TensorFlow Enterprise offers hands-on, engineer-to-
engineer support and assistance from both the GCP
Joseph Mente, Engineering Manager, DevOps at and TensorFlow teams at Google. To date, AW S has
DroneDeploy, calls GCP’s AI features “years ahead no managed TensorFlow Service.
of what others [offer].”27
“Blockchain gave us a platform to push machine
In addition to honing the technology, Google is learning out to the edge,” says Aaron Brown,
also committed to the ethical use of AI/ML. Google MadHive’s VP of Engineering. “Google’s TensorFlow
developed a set of principles that the company and Cloud ML were the perfect tools to build on. It let
follows w hen developing new AI/ML solutions.28 us focus on our core tech: fully private targeting
GCP offers an Explainable AI toolset, which allows through collaborative and anonymous machine
developers to learning.”30
create transparent AI/ML solutions that provide human-
interpretable explanations of machine-generated
decisions. AWS has no explainable AI tools.

25
https://sada.com/blog/customers/sada-helps-me-me-use-google-cloud-platform-to-organize- 29
https://www.wired.com/2015/11/google-open-sources-its-artificial-intelligence-engine/
the-worlds-memes/ 30
https://sada.com/blog/customers/sada-helps-madhive-deliver-blockchain-ad-tech-with-privacy-
26
Ibid. by-design/
27
https://sada.com/blog/customers/sada-helps-dronedeploy-take-flight-with-google-cloud/
28
https://www.blog.google/technology/ai/ai-principles/
16
 Google Cloud TPU Chips & Pods its name suggests, Inferentia is designed for inference,
which is the decision-making an ML system does once
Another area where Google stands apart is its it has been trained; for example, recognizing a car in an
proprietary AI chip, the Tensor Processing Unit image after the model has been trained using very
(TPU), which is specifically tailored for large data sets containing tagged photos of cars.
TensorFlow.
Google built the TPU to accelerate the neural network Conversely, the Cloud TPU was designed to seamlessly
computations of services such as Google Search, Street move ML workloads from training33 to serving, and
View, Photos, and Translate. The TPU is not for sale, Cloud TPU Pods have set MLPerf records for both
but GCP customers can take advantage of it via the training and inference.34 GCP was the first public cloud
Cloud TPU service. As of this writing, the most current provider to outperform on-premise systems when
version of the TPU is the third generation. running large-scale, industry-standard ML training
workloads of Transformer, Single Shot Detector (SSD),
In addition to individual chips, GCP customers can and ResNet-50. In the Transformer and SSD
also access Cloud TPU Pods, which are scalable categories, Cloud TPU v3 Pods trained models over
virtual supercomputers. A single Cloud TPU Pod can 84% faster than the fastest on-premise systems in the
include more than 1,000 individual TPU chips, which MLPerf Closed Division.35
are connected by an ultra-fast, two-dimensional
toroidal mesh network. Each delivers more than 100 Training and serving on the same hardware platform
petaFLOPs of computing power. A Cloud TPU v3 helps prevent potential accuracy losses at inference
Pod time and does not require quantization, recalibration, or
is comparable with a top 5 supercomputer worldwide retraining. For example, using the TPU v3 platform for
in terms of raw mathematical operations per second.31 both training and inference enables Google Translate
to push new models to production within hours of
The AWS ML chip, Inferentia, is quite different than model validation.
Cloud TPU. It is much newer than the TPU, having
been rolled out to AWS customers in December
2019.32 As

31
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/googles-scalable-supercomputers- 34
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/cloud-tpu-breaks-scalability-records-for-
for-machine-learning-cloud-tpu-pods-are-now-publicly-available-in-beta ai-inference
32
https://www.eetimes.com/aws-rolls-out-ai-inference-chip/ 35
Ibid.
33
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/cloud-tpu-pods-break-ai-training-
records
17
 Comprehensive, easy-to-
configure cybersecurity
Cybersecurity is another core competency for Google, born of
necessity. The world’s most popular search engine is also the
world’s biggest cyber attack surface. Every minute of every
day, Google’s cybersecurity tools:

‐ Prevent 10 million spam messages from reaching

Gmail customers.
‐ Scan 694,000 indexed Web pages for harmful
software.
‐ Intercept and stop 7,000 deceitful URLs, executables, and
browser extensions that may carry viruses, unwanted content,
or phishing attempts.
‐ Report 6,000 instances of unwanted software and nearly 1,000
instances of suspected malware to Chrome users.
‐ Identify and label two phishing sites and one malware site.36

To accomplish these tasks, Google’s cybersecurity engineers must

have a deep understanding of the real-time threat environment.
Hundreds of the world’s leading experts in information, application,
“The security policies on AWS are and network security work to protect the GCP infrastructure.37
notoriously finicky and really hard to
get right. I find GCP’s user accounts and Cyber attacks due to misconfigured cloud settings are at epidemic
permissions to be more straightforward levels. According to McAfee, while organizations estimate they
than AWS. I probably spent a few hours average 37 IaaS misconfiguration issues per month, the actual
configuring security permissions on number can approach 3,500.38 To stem this tide, Google has
GCP, whereas on AWS, it took weeks”39 gone out of its way to make GCP’s security controls as easy to
use as possible.
Jim Hefner
https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/security_at_scale_with_cloud.pdf
CTO, ME.ME
36

37
https://info.sada.com/hubfs/Google_Clouds_approach_to_security_e-book_Business_GCP_Y18.pdf
38
https://www.zdnet.com/article/99-percent-of-all-misconfiguration-in-the-public-cloud-go-unreported/
39
https://sada.com/blog/customers/sada-helps-me-me-use-google-cloud-platform-to-organize-the-worlds-
memes/ 18
By default, GCP encrypts all data in transit between
Google, its customers, and its data centers, as well
as all data at rest in GCP services. In AWS, data
encryption is available, but not by default. AWS
users need to manually turn on default and
automatic
encryption for all objects in the bucket, and they
must manually create encrypted EBS volumes.

Google Cloud also allows developers to encrypt

cloud applications at the application layer, for the
highest levels of data security. The Cloud DLP tool
makes
it easier for users to identify and manage sensitive
information, including the ability to redact sensitive data
from text streams before writing to disk, generating
logs, or performing analyses.

Google’s commitment to cybersecurity extends to its

hardware. The company is one of the world’s largest
hardware manufacturers,40 but they do not sell their
servers; they build them solely for internal use so
that they have complete control over the build
process.
While AWS has some private cables, Google’s entire IP
data network consists of Google-owned fiber,
including a private mesh of transatlantic and
transpacific connectivity operating at over five times
the total throughput of the public internet. This
improves the security of data in transit by limiting
hops across the public Internet.

40
https://www.wired.com/2012/07/google-server-manufacturing/
19
Industry-specific and industry-
agnostic compliance
Like AWS and other cloud providers, GCP undergoes regular
independent audits to ensure compliance with a wide variety
of compliance standards, including standards specific to
certain industries, such as healthcare, financial services, and
the public
sector. Current compliance standards supported include
HIPAA,
PCI DSS, ISO 27001, 27017, and 27018, CCPA, GDPR,
COPPA,
FedRAMP, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and NIST 800-53 and
800-
171. GCP also holds a CSA STAR self-certification and has
released SOC 1, SOC 2, and SOC 3 attestations.

GCP maintains a FedRAMP High provisional authority to operate

(P-ATO) from the FedRAMP JAB for 17 GCP products in five
regions; a Moderate P-ATO for 64 GCP products in 17 regions,
and a Moderate authority to operate (ATO) for 27 Google
Workspace products.

20
Total access transparency for compliance audits resolving a technical or security issue. GCP’s
internal technical controls require any employees
who access customer content to provide a valid
Audit logs play a critical role in compliance
business justification, and Google performs regular
certifications, which typically require highly detailed
audits to
descriptions of
ensure that these access controls are being adhered
all systems and controls. While both AWS and GCP
to.
allow organizations to produce audit logs documenting
their own administrators’ activities, access by Amazon
Event monitoring that’s not limited by region
administrators is not logged. The lack of visibility into
AWS employee access makes it difficult or impossible
for AWS customers to produce required Both GCP and AWS provide integrated monitoring
documentation for certain compliance audits, and it services. In AWS, Amazon CloudWatch provides both
precludes replicating on-prem security practices in the logging and monitoring, while in GCP, Stackdriver
cloud. Logging and Stackdriver Monitoring provide logging
and monitoring services, respectively.
GCP is the only major cloud provider to offer
users total access visibility through Access However, the monitoring scope of Amazon CloudWatch
Transparency, which provides near real-time is separate for each region, while Stackdriver
service logs when GCP administrators access Monitoring can be used to monitor up to 1,000 GCP
user content. Access Transparency logs the projects, regardless of region. This means that in AWS,
reason for the access, the it’s difficult to collect security data and manage
accessor’s location, the exact resources accessed, and permissions across regions, even within a single AWS
the actions taken on specific resources. GCP is also account.
the only cloud provider with Access Approval, which
enables organizations to approve or reject requests for Additionally, CloudWatch monitors only AWS and on-
access by Google employees. prem workloads. Stackdriver can monitor AWS projects,
along with on-prem deployments, so multi-cloud and
Like other cloud providers, GCP never accesses hybrid users get a single pane of glass through which
customer data unless doing so is absolutely to observe their entire environment.
necessary to fulfill its contractual obligations, such as
when

21
 Kubernetes expertise from the
developers of Kubernetes
Kubernetes is one of the world’s most popular container
orchestration tools, and it’s only getting more commonplace.
Flexera found that Kubernetes adoption nearly doubled
between 2018 and 2019, skyrocketing from 27% to 48%.41

AWS offers Kubernetes services, but Google is the creator of the

Kubernetes project, and it remains the dominant contributor to its
codebase. This “home-field advantage” makes GCP a particularly
attractive choice for DevOps organizations. GCP users get to
access new Kubernetes features and deployments immediately,
while rollouts on AWS are delayed. They also get the networking
stack that Kubernetes was designed to operate on, which
simplifies configuration and operations. Google Kubernetes Engine
(GKE), widely considered the industry standard for running
Kubernetes,42 automates baseline functionalities, while AWS
requires a lot of manual work to set up Kubernetes clusters.43 This
makes GKE more user-friendly than Amazon EKS, especially for
developers who are new to Kubernetes or containers.

Container security and compliance can be tricky. Anthos Config

Management, a key component of the Google Anthos hybrid
“One of the things that we found and multi-cloud management solution, automates policy and
appealing [about GCP] was that [it] security for Kubernetes clusters at scale. Out of the box, users
uses Kubernetes, which is an open can create multi-cluster policies that set and enforce role-
source technology. We wanted based access controls, resource quotas, and create
something namespaces on all
that would be easy to maintain Kubernetes clusters, both on-prem and in the cloud. AWS has
without outside expertise.”44 no
equivalent feature.
Ryan Damm
41
https://www.flexera.com/blog/cloud/2019/02/cloud-computing-trends-2019-state-of-the-cloud-survey/
CEO and Co-Founder, Visby 42 experiences/
https://www.enterpriseai.news/2019/11/14/dockers-sale-elevates-kubernetes-as-standard/
22
43
https://www.fairwinds.com/blog/the-benefits-of-running-kubernetes-on-google-container-engine
44
https://sada.com/blog/customers/sada-helps-visby-leverage-google-cloud-to-build-immersive-holographic-
Open source commitment
Enterprises are increasingly concerned with managing software
licenses in public cloud environments; their top three challenges
are understanding the cost implications of this software, ensuring
that they are following software licensing rules, and the
complexity of these rules.45 These are good reasons to turn to
open source solutions.

While Amazon has built many of its commercial services on top

of open source software, it has also been accused of “strip-
mining” open source projects, incorporating code written by
others into its own [paid] services.46

In contrast, GCP views open source developers as “equal

collaborators, and not simply a resource to be mined.”47 Google
is continually seeking to form new strategic partnerships with
open source developers to offer managed services that are
integrated with GCP.

Additionally, Google has created over 2,000 open source projects

in the last decade, including Kubernetes, TensorFlow, Chromium,
and Go. GCP’s tight integration with open source partners,
including CloudBees, Confluent, MongoDB, Elastic.co, Neo4j,
Redis Labs, InfluxData, and Datastax, makes it easier for
enterprise customers to build on open source technologies.

45
Ibid.
46
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/15/technology/amazon-aws-cloud-competition.html
47
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/open-source/bringing-the-best-of-open-source-to-google-cloud-customers
23
Reliability & performance
Google’s global network consists of thousands of miles of fiber
optic cable, and it utilizes advanced networking and edge caching
services to deliver fast, consistent, and scalable performance. GCP
has the largest private network of any public cloud vendor, with
over twice the number of submarine cables as AWS. Because
GCP’s points of presence (POPs) connect to Google’s data centers
via Google-owned fiber, GCP-based applications have fast,
reliable, and unimpeded access to all GCP services.

GCP’s 99.95% SLA is in line with AWS. However, unlike GCP,

AWS’ SLA applies only to the availability of the control API, not
individual VMs. Google Compute Engine offers live migration to
keep virtual machine instances running even when a host system
event occurs, such as a software or hardware update.
Conversely, AWS occasionally performs maintenance on the
hardware that underlies EC2 instances, which might require a
few minutes of downtime. This is why AWS will not commit to
a 99.95% uptime SLA on virtual machines.

Google’s 24/7/365 reliability was a major reason why game

developer FlowPlay chose GCP. “In [the online gaming] industry,
there is no such thing as ‘down for maintenance,’” notes Douglas
Pearson, Flowplay’s Co-Founder and CTO. “There is no ‘off-
season.’ There is no window where we can be offline, not
ever.”48

48
https://sada.com/blog/customers/flowplay/
24
 FlowPlay also saw the potential for indirect cost
savings on GCP over AW S due to GCP’s higher disk
speeds. “Most of the money we were spending prior
to migrating to the cloud was on our databases,”
Pearson says. “Our main driver was how many
operations could be made on a drive per second.
GCP offered higher disk speeds (IOPS) than AWS,
meaning that we’d get the same performance from
our databases at a lower cost.”49

Ryan Damm, CEO and Co-Founder of Visby,

decided to switch to GCP after encountering scaling
and performance issues on AWS. “In AWS, we
couldn’t
commission resources whenever we wanted to,” Damm
explains. “The caps that AWS imposed on us meant
that processing a video would take days, and we’d
have to plan around that. This placed an upper limit on
our growth.”50

After migrating to GCP from an off-the-shelf

platform, the team at game developer FUN-GI was
immediately impressed by GCP’s ease of deployment
and scaling. “We went from thousands of players and
a lot of issues during soft launch, to a global launch
on GCP w ith 11 million downloads while maintaining
excellent data integrity and server performance. We
don’t have to worry about scaling; GCP auto-scales.
It just works,” recalls Alfred Fung, CEO.51

49
Ibid.
50
https://sada.com/blog/customers/sada-helps-visby-leverage-google-cloud-to-build-immersive-
holographic-experiences/
51
https://sada.com/blog/customers/sada-helps-fun-gi-fine-tune-gcp-google-app-engine/

25
 Ease of
use
GCP is designed to be easy to use for both IT administrators and
non-technical employees. Google has heavily invested in practical
training that gets new users up to speed very quickly. Coursera
and Pluralsight offer on-demand training, and in-person
classroom training is available around the globe.

The on-demand, entry-level GCP Fundamentals course

can be completed in about one day.52 Cloud professionals
who are experienced in AWS will find that much of their
existing
knowledge will transfer easily to GCP;53 the GCP training for AWS
professionals is only six hours long.54

“Using GCP is like having a

black box. We just push the
code, and GCP does what it
needs to do to keep the system
running. Once we push the
code, App Engine and the other
services scale automatically,
which saves us a lot of
debugging time. It’s just a super
simple system to use, with
super simple services.”55 52
https://www.coursera.org/learn/gcp-fundamentals
53
https://cloud.google.com/docs/compare/aws/
54
https://cloud.google.com/training/courses/gcp-fundamentals-aws
Veer Singh 55
https://sada.com/blog/customers/foodjets-drives-innovation-with-google-cloud-sada/

CTO, FoodJets 26
Simplified hybrid cloud
management
Google Anthos is a 100% software-based solution that allows
companies to deploy workloads in their own data centers.
While AWS offers a hybrid appliance, the purchase price is
nearly $1 million, and it lacks many basic features of AWS,
such as S3. In contrast, Anthos runs on enterprises’ existing
hardware.

27
Personalized service
If your company invests in GCP, Google will invest in your
company to ensure that you succeed. GCP offers flexible,
technical, role- based, project specific support, and support is not
operated as a profit center.

Google Cloud Enterprise Support customers have assigned

Technical Account Managers (TAMs). Each TAM is dedicated
to 1 to 4 customers, and in addition to providing support,
TAMs
advocate for customers’ feature requests to Google Cloud
product teams. Enterprise Support customers also have 24/7
access to Technical Solutions Engineers, who are fully
connected to an army of Google Site Reliability Engineers (SREs)
and Product Engineering teams to troubleshoot critical issues.

GCP customers rave about the personalized service they

receive from GCP. “Google’s internal team and the TAM team at
SADA both work with us very closely; they’re a phone call
away if we have any questions. Other services, like AWS,
didn’t give us anywhere near the customer service we get from
SADA and Google Cloud,” said Veer Singh, CTO of FoodJets.56

Jim Hefner at ME.ME echoes Singh’s observations. “The personal

engagement is great. We feel that Google Cloud and SADA value
us as customers much more than AWS ever did. Google should
be applauded not only for their platform and tools, but also for
their partner ecosystem.”57

56
Ibid.
57
https://sada.com/blog/customers/sada-helps-me-me-use-google-cloud-platform-to-organize-the-worlds-memes/

28
“Amazon wants volume business, which a
small company like ours couldn’t give them.
They saw us as inconsequential. Google
was willing to invest in our potential, not
just who we are now as a company, but
who we have the potential to become. That
made a big difference.”58
Daniel Morreale
VP & CIO, Hunterdon Healthcare

58
https://sada.com/blog/customers/sada-gcp-help-northgate-market-deliver-authentic-value-to-underserved-communities/

29
 Enablement, not competition
Amazon’s aggressive expansion into new market verticals
is making an increasing number of AWS customers
uneasy.
Businesses in the retail sector, healthcare, and other verticals that
directly compete with Amazon, or that fear Amazon may
compete with them in the future, are moving away from AWS
because they do not wish to contribute to a potential
competitor’s bottom line.

Competitive concerns were among the reasons why Northgate

Market chose GCP over AWS. “If we came across future
opportunities to provide services outside of our own stores, to
other retailers, we didn’t want to be in a situation where those
retailers might question why we were an AWS customer,”
explained Harrison Lewis, Chief Information and Privacy Officer.
“Because Amazon is branching out into so many verticals, a lot
of retailers see hosting with AWS as subsidizing a competitor.”59

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian directly addressed this issue

during his first public appearance, promising, “Google is very clear
that we’re here to enable partners; we’re not here to compete
with partners.”60

"We’ve got a lot planned with GCP.

It’s offering us a strategic advantage
over other companies, especially
companies that are using other
cloud platforms.”61
59
https://sada.com/blog/customers/sada-gcp-help-northgate-market-deliver-authentic-value-to-underserved-
Harrison Lewis communities/
Chief Information and Privacy officer, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/12/microsoft-google-cloud-pitch-vs-aws-we-wont-compete-with-you.html
60

61
https://sada.com/blog/customers/sada-gcp-help-northgate-market-deliver-authentic-value-to-underserved-
Northgate Market communities/
30
 About S ADA

At SADA, we climb every mountain, clear every hurdle, and turn the improbable into
possible – over and over again. Simply put, we propel your organization forward.

It’s not enough to migrate to the cloud, it’s about what you do once you’re there.
Accelerating application development. Advancing productivity and collaboration. Using
your data as a competitive edge. When it comes to Google Cloud, we’re not an add-
on, we’re a must-have, driving the business performance of our clients with its power.

Beyond our expertise and experience, what sets us apart is our people. It’s the spirit
that carried us from scrappy origins as one of the Google Cloud launch partners to an
award- winning global partner year after year. With a client list that spans healthcare,
financial services, media and entertainment, retail, manufacturing, public sector and
digital natives
– we simply get the job done, every step of the way.

Your challenges are ours. We’re ready. Let’s go.

“SADA was a guarantee that our GCP “Working with SADA has enabled us to “Having a good tech advisory partner
migration was going to work. We didn’t grow rapidly. Reltio’s vision is to fuel the like SADA helps offset what we have to
just get a bunch of help tickets and experiences of the future that matter manage and monitor. It’s a great extension
credits; we could actually pick up the most to our customers. Thanks to GCP for our company. That’s what a good
phone and talk to someone — it’s a and SADA, we are able to fulfill our partner should be. It makes our lives
partnership.” mission and vision faster.” easier.”

Jim Hefner Zoltan Gombosi Gregg Church

CTO, ME.ME VP Engineering, Reltio President, 4medica

A few of
our clients

Let’s talk : 818 . 927 . 3660 / googlesales@SADA.com /

SADA.com