The Differences Between Microsoft Azure, AWS and GCP

The Differences Between the "big 3" cloud providers (Microsoft, Amazon and Google).

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Speaker 1 0:03

Welcome to Azure for the women, the mostly out of your focus cloud author, rocky by the Silver Shit. Sit back, relax, grab a group and talk to the cloud. All right. Hello. Welcome to the yet to be named. How's your podcasts with blue silver shift? Uh, we have your host and moderator, you're Mark Wilson and I have my colleagues of the founders of the organization, uh, credit slack and I, John Dawson had to do, uh, so why don't we do just a little bit of an Intro, a credit, one of you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do around here at DSS.

Speaker 2 0:42

Sure. I'm the managing partner for blue silver shift or an Azure specialist consulting firm focusing, uh, on, uh, Microsoft Azure or we do a bit about the three 65 myself. I've been in the IT industry for over 20 years, uh, in western Canada.

Speaker 1 0:59

Awesome. John,

Speaker 2 1:01

John Dobson and I've been a, uh, architect for a while and I'm Craig's business partner in blue, silver shift and a right. He get cold here,

Speaker 1 1:10

right? And again, I am Martha and but we call executive that be assessable and been around for a little while. But I'm gonna try to keep these guys in line as we do this podcast. We'll see off how you're and cat suddenly hit a challenge can be a shot. Um, so you know, the purpose of the podcasts, you know, we're really just one to spread awareness on Microsoft Azures cloud offering as well as be able to share our expertise and uh, two people that are interested across the industry and on other verticals as well as far as what you can expect them. A little bit about our style, who we want to keep this lights. Uh, interesting. You know, we may fight with each other who made a legal fight with outside opinions, but for the most part we're just trying to get good ideas out there. Um, and uh, we'll put them in front of people that may not be aware of them. So again, trying to keep it pretty late. Um, some examples we might cover the future, you know, some, some technical topics. You know, we're, we're pretty passionate about things like file governance, uh, and, and there's definitely going to be some technical aspects of the, of the podcasts, but then we might cover some other, um, you know, lighter, maybe even a bit more controversial topics, things like, you know, as the cloud going to get you fired if you're an it professional and how can you rather avoid that pitfall or learn from it and grow from that as well. So, um, lots of cool stuff coming up in the future before we get started. Uh, it's the end of the day on Friday, so let's, let's pour ourselves a drink. So, uh, credit, what are you, why don't you start, what are we got going here for you and I for sure. Well,

Speaker 2 2:38

um, you decided you wanted to join me in a scotch, so I appreciate that because I am a scotch man. Uh, today we've got a, a lowly here, you know, just intro Internet, but at Glenfarclas 12 year old, um, so it's a very, uh, mellow scotch from the space sign area and uh, and um, in the highlands. And I'm gonna turn it over to John to talk about what he's drinking or, uh, you know, or not.

Speaker 1 3:05

I just have the right code. Second to be a fee. It's a Canadian a sense. Well, cheers guys. Cheers. [inaudible] everybody. All right, so the first topic we're going to have for this week's podcast, uh, just as an introduction, we're gonna be talking about the differences between Microsoft Azure, AWS and GCP, Google, Google cloud platform. Um, so on that note, I'll let you guys take away. Why don't we start with cracking, sir? Well, as we mentioned from the, in the

Speaker 2 3:43

beginning, we're obviously on the Azure side of things, but, uh, we, we are well versed on everything else that's going on in their cloud. We're trying to keep up on both the AWS and GCP, uh, uh, new things that are coming onto the, on the stream. Um, and really, well, why do you want to start with this topic is because it's one of the very first questions that we get asked by customers. So we get into an engagement customer knows from, you know, they can see on our website where Azure focus. So they assume that we're going to be biased towards Azure. And there they might ask us why we might even say it, we're going to AWS or we're going GCP. Um, why should we talk to you guys? And we come in with an unbiased view in terms of showing, let the numbers speak for themselves. So we've done for multiple customers, uh, economic assessments of what it would cost to move their workloads to AWS, GCP, or is your, and let the customer make the decision. And in every single scenario that we've done that for, if the customer is running a Microsoft stack application or a windows bay, whether it's windows or.net or sequel server or SQL databases, what have you, if it's a Microsoft stack application because of the licensing, um, it's going to be cheaper hands down on Azure. And there's many reasons for that, which we can get into later. Uh, but you know, that is that the numbers don't lie. And there's a lot of, um, you know, find out their fear, uncertainty and doubt around what, what it costs to run on cloud or on Amazon or Azure versus Google. If you just go to the pricing calculators right off the bat, um, compare Azure, AWS and GCP, GCP looks cheaper and I get told that all the time where we know it's going to be cheaper to run on GCP. So that's why we're going that way and we get them to show us, well, how do you come to that conclusion? And it's because with Google, they bake in discounts, right? The based on how long you run your, your, uh, compute. If we're talking to compute on you, there's lots of other facets of the public cloud. But if we talk compute the, uh, the pricing for a GCP gets reduced. So if you're having a computer machine running 24, seven, and you're going to get the maximum discount, whereas if you turn it off every night and you're only running at one third of the time, maybe you get no discount. Like, I don't know the exact numbers, but the discounts are baked in. So you compare that to the pricing calculator in Azure and AWS, which were very similar. They, um, those, to get those same discounts, you actually have to pre buy what's called a reserve instance. So it's not an apples to apples comparison. And that's the one thing that, um, you know, I'll kind of stop there and let John Talk that we actually see is the misinformation that's out there and a misunderstanding of how to interpret all this information. And that's what I think we can bring as a partner and a trusted advisor to our customers. Um, is kind of getting cutting through all of that five and getting to the real message. And what's, what's gonna be the real value for you as a customer? Yeah,

Speaker 1 7:04

no, someone new to the space. I'll say those proxy talk later. She knew a little bit tricky. Um, for sure. So I've been for abuse is very helpful. I want to see, before I throw over to John, I learned something new today and not as flood. What is the fear? Uncertainty and no, yes, we're going to pull that one off in the future. Sorry, John [inaudible].

Speaker 3 7:23

Uh, anyhow, uh, grid points credit all around. Uh, I think it's different strokes for different folks as well. Um, Amazon is, um, was, was there first in the cloud as a, as a tentative tumble, uh, cloud public cloud platform and um, there the giant that's out there and I was surprised actually see Microsoft catch up so their CEO energize the company to actually allow them to catch up. And then a lot of ways they're supersede any both in the technology in the footprint. Amazon is right. Um, Google suite.

Speaker 2 7:59

I'm just going to play off of that. Sorry, just before you change topic because I was speaking to somebody just yesterday, one of our software partners that they said just in the last nine months, prior to nine months ago, they were seeing um, vote 50% of the deals, or sorry, 80% of the dealers are going to AWS and 20%, we're going to do in between Azure and GCP, maybe most of the Azure. Now, whether they're seeing as 50% of the customers are going on as you're 40% or 30 to 40% are AWS. And then the other is GCP and this is the Canadian market us as much different, but it's, it's, that's a nine months. That's a significant change in a short period.

Speaker 3 8:41

Right? And I think it's got to do with the adoption curve and in particular the size of the enterprises in the adoption curve and the reasons they want to go for that. So let's start with the Amazon. They're first to the market. Um, they awesome. They're sweet spot is for startups and people with no legacy. If you are an enterprise and you've moved into Amazon, what happens is is, is, uh, you still have to pay for the operating system licensing. There's no capability to actually buy the operative system licensing within the VM, et cetera. But most importantly, you will get deals like sequel, etc. On the, on the license side. Um, but Amazon was first and there they're there to the market. Um, in my opinion, uh, Microsoft has got some compelling advantages for corporate America. That's not startups with no legacy. It's corporate America that's gotten lots of legacy. Number one is is that they've got active directory and active directory is sold I say as a staff service within, which is a software as a service worldwide, regionally independent solution that integrates with your office three 65, 10 and disclose your own premises, active directory that you know and love that has been going through everything or are or has been providing the security if edification framework for years. That's number one. Number two is ammos are uh, Microsoft has, um, office, meaning that Microsoft owns the office platform and office three 65 corporate America again is addicted to that and they only have one pharmacist exchange servers. All their meals in there, you know, office three 65, they also have a software licensing that's all integrated throughout it. So the integration there is with Azure is already compelled it. Um, on top of that they have, Microsoft also has sequel server and sequel server licensing. We've read certain things recently. Prego, correct me where I'm wrong here. That CQL server is a five times more expensive to run an Amazon in iis or the pads equivalent, um, in, in Amazon than it is in Microsoft. And it's because Microsoft owns the five four. So if you've, you're integrating an APP that's from a on premises, uh, and, and you don't want to go lift and shift, I asked with that safe, what you can do is actually just go into like, Microsoft becomes a much more compelling argument cause you can buy that sequel in literally criminals. Uh, the other thing is, is the enterprise license it. So Microsoft has, um, uh, enterprise licensing and they can cut deals. What is the on premises, uh, eight hub?

Speaker 2 11:24

Well the is there have reduced benefit. Yeah. So they've got that [inaudible] explain it briefly did for in quick summary. If you own an operating system license or SQL server license on problem, um, and you've paid software assurance on that, you can actually carry that forward to the cloud. Um, we've actually spoken to some customers that are under the misconception that if they're paying software assurance on it, they can carry it to AWS or GCP that is actually incorrect. And if you talk to Microsoft, they'll tell you that you're invalidating your Microsoft license by doing that. So it's only under Microsoft that that applies. Um, but having said that, those same customers that make that mistake of thinking that they can carry their software assurance to a AWS or GCP, what they don't realize is they're paying for that license the second time, w because it's built into the per second or per hour, the compute costs. So on AWS and GCP cause they have to pay Microsoft. Yes.

Speaker 3 12:25

Basically that would be shown to the up to the, to the end user or the consumer. Not easily, not easily. These systems are so confusing now and for a customer to untangle the technology and then to go on untangle the licensing, oftentimes it's cheaper to pay double or you don't know your bank or you don't know you're paying double, which is ecourse. Hmm. Yeah. So, um, on that thread though, um, uh, the Microsoft also is Nav the largest open source a vendor in the world. So you could run Linux vms, you can run a lot of different open source technologies to do clusters, et cetera inside of Microsoft Azure. I mean it used to be just only an Amazon that you were doing that. Um, Microsoft also has a unique policy governance framework that is extensible and it's, and it's actually something that's growing that court, Matt, if they're throwing lots of updates into it. And when I say it's extensible, meaning that you can configure it in multiple ways for multiple needs. So if you're a customer and you need different subscriptions, you can actually carve, right? And your subscriptions in, adhere them all at the same policy. One policy to rule them all they say. And, uh, within that policy you would have common elements and then you would have everything else underneath. And you're also able to further buying that with not just management groups, but to exclude certain resource groups where it comes out of the exception. So, um, Microsoft is also in front with, um, the number of feature updates and the cadence of the releases of those updates is greater than what I've seen from Amazon or Google. And it just means that there's this much development machine that's listening from user voice. It's a platform on Microsoft and it's listening to customers and they're putting that data back in to the customers. They're, they're eating their own dog food essentially of what they want you to do for your deployments to get your cloud enablement. And all of these feature updates are coming up all the time. So just surprised, you know, to see 60 updates and a quarter.

Speaker 2 14:25

The pace has been incredible. And I think, you know, there's a lot of stuff in the media about crediting massage in a Dolla, changing the entire Microsoft culture and in a very short period of time, and it's, it's evident. So John and I, many of our listeners wouldn't know this. We had a previous company before blue silver shift, uh, started it in 2010, uh, built a building a software, uh, software is a service SAS solution. Um, and we, we were looking at in 2010 in cloud is still relatively new, but we knew we didn't want to buy a server, put it in Iraq and host it somewhere. So we started looking at, um, at the time between AWS and Azure and AWS of course created this public cloud market, uh, or at least the whole concept behind it. And uh, but we evaluated between AWS and Azure, which platform you wanted to load on. We were developing and wind and Microsoft, there was going to be windows BMS. We knew it was going to be Microsoft stack, but Azure, it was just not gonna work for us. We couldn't, couldn't make it could make, could have made it work, but it just would've been either cost prohibitive or painful technically or other. There was a whole bunch of whole slew of reasons. And so we made the decision to go AWS. And I interestingly, about three years later, I had the same sort of opportunity with a client to evaluate what platform there are. They an on premises application, monolithic application and they wanted, they were moving into the cloud and they had to evaluate and I ran that evaluation. We looked at AWS and Azure are very closely and admittedly ate up Azure, have made some inroads in games on what AWS had done. Technically from a technical standpoint, they had changed the whole um, uh, environment. I think the underlying is your stack at that point was, was rewritten. Um, but still it was lagging in a certain number of areas. You know, the network stack or a, you know, all the firewall, everything. It just wasn't there. But you know, in the last three years, three or four years, totally different plots. Completely pleasure is enterprise grade and it's, it's, it's in our opinion, the, the enterprise, it's one of the most rent loss public cloud offerings out there.

Speaker 3 16:45

Yeah. So with all of you do, this was overseeing, you're talking about the velocity being so impressive.

Speaker 1 16:50

Where do we see the differences between the platforms in five years from now? How do you see those trajectories veering off from each other? And if you could take a guess, what do you think is gonna be the main difference between the three different offerings in five years time?

Speaker 3 17:05

That's a very good question. Yeah, that's very good question. Um, I think more and more people are dropping off Amazon for those reasons that we've been talking about where they'll get the licensing advantages and they'll get some more of the management features, uh, in, in, uh, uh, Azure. But um, as you're is going to continue to still throwing up the, uh, data centers, but Amazon's, its own worst enemy with the success. Meaning that Walmart I think was the first major retailer that had all their stuff in Amazon that said, hey, we're going to take it out of there and move it over because they don't want to empower their competitor by giving them money. Okay.

Speaker 2 17:45

Because Amazon bought whole foods. Yeah, of course. So yeah, just brick and mortar. And that's happening in a lot of retail. We have a number of retail customers. They're like, we can't go on AWS for that reason. Cause they are in debt not only because of the whole foods, but it all started because Amazon is a competitor of placing a lot of brick and mortar retailers are sold. There were a few, should we go on Amazon because they just see it as basically feeding their competition. Exactly. Yeah. Whereas Microsoft is far more agnostic within that space except against maybe other people that compete against Microsoft there when you go to Amazon or Google. So that's a good question around where do we see it in five years, in five years is a lifetime only, again to go back to one of slides that I recently saw from Microsoft is that 95% of on premises servers will be in a public cloud. So when we 5% when remain behind, whether that's a print server or or some type of um, uh, Scada system except for a historian, everything else is going to be in Azure. So you're going to see Microsoft like their stock, like their earnings increasing even more than five years. And [inaudible] future performance does not [inaudible]. So you're going to see them rise up and actually do something pretty important overall, uh, with what they're doing and you just going to see a mass movement over to it. But that the cloud brings a couple of advantages. One is time to market and another one is the ability to empower developers to quickly solve business problems. And that was really prohibitive before. So when you see the, the more business problems you see developers solving, the more disruption you'll see in the more competitive, more competition between competitive whores actually happening. So that's where the cloud is going to be in five years. Yeah. So public cloud is really, from an infrastructure perspective, is as a commodity. So it's a race to the bottom. The, the company that like whether it's Amazon, Microsoft, Google, the company that can serve up that infrastructure for the lowest marginal cost is going to win or there'll be able to sell it, sell it for the, the lowest and developed the most features while the cost is being driven down. Right. We'll attract more people and, and Amazon's not developing enough features in comparison to Azure. Not at the same pace where I think an both Amazon and Google cloud platform have a, a strong presence is in open source, uh, companies that are heavily using open source. Um, there's definitely some great, uh, advances in machine learning on Google in particular. Um, and so there's going to be these niche offerings that I think both AWS and GCP are going to shine in and there's nothing looked precluding you from choosing a best of breed public cloud for the different applications. So he

Speaker 3 20:52

except for one point and that's an egress. All of them charge on egress traffic. So traffic coming out of the cloud. Yeah, that's great. You'd asked that a lot of times with customers we have multi cloud strategy, which is kind of um, it's kind of diminishing returns.

Speaker 2 21:09

But yeah, there's lots of factors to consider. But at my, where I was going was, I think the open source side of things is where AWS and GCP are strong today and will continue to be strong where they're going to see either, um, presence eroded is in the Microsoft windows, whether, whether it be, you know, hosting windows vms or platform as a service, a web servers. Um, but yeah, I mean Microsoft is, as John said, the biggest open source provider, partly because they bought getting up. But um, they still doesn't matter I numbers number. Yeah,

Speaker 3 21:48

exactly. Everybody has a spin on it, but they're viewed to be anti open source or Auntie.

Speaker 2 21:54

But they've changed that. Absolutely. They're coming. Right. You're tributing a lot to the open source community. You know, they're, they're opening stuff up as our AWS and Google for that matter. And COOBERNETTI's wouldn't exist if it wasn't for good.

Speaker 3 22:06

Okay. Okay. So why don't you see this competition in action and

Speaker 1 22:15

you want, and you're kind of thinking, okay, well where does the competition go? Let me get the question. Trying to ask. So what I'm wanting to know is,

Speaker 2 22:22

okay,

Speaker 1 22:22

between these different cloud offerings, is this like a, is this like a Highlander situation? Is this like there can only be

Speaker 3 22:29

no, you know, they go, they keep each other honest. Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 1 22:33

So, so it's, it's one announces a price reduction, true capital, the cloud Kaplan in a free market in action. So, so we're not going to see a case where there's going to be,

Speaker 3 22:44

you know, one,

Speaker 1 22:46

one cloud provider that's going to pull the ball in 10 years, 15 years. It's, no,

Speaker 3 22:51

okay. No, because that would be one company at doing everyone. So Microsoft is owned by Cause Public Company, uh, let's call it [inaudible]. It's got majority ownership of Bill Gates as an example of, even though I don't know if he's actually the owner, Jeff Bezos is the owner of Amazon, meaning he's got majority within the public company. Those two guys are not in competition. I mean it's just too public services that are out there. Amazon web services was created for the retail business because of the retail business. Couldn't find someone to do everything they needed to do within there. And then they perfected the offering with the amendment at tenants. Okay, well

Speaker 1 23:36

good to know that we already have something there for sure on that note and the Suffolk, one last question. Now this is a bonus question and I caught on to mind earlier, but I think John, you sound like this inspired, you said that Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos also your gone competition, let's say that they were so what Holden squashing for today? Um, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Larry Page all drops on an island wearing nothing but on one cloth. Bells of the deaf. Who Comes on a tie? I don't know want my opinion is no, no. Uh, nothing but their wits.

Speaker 2 24:09

At least this isn't the EFAP marry, kill

Speaker 1 24:14

[inaudible]. I don't know if you do, we'll answer that one. So page gates Bayzos dropped them an island 24 hours, however long it was. [inaudible] who comes over? Who is was a little survivor.

Speaker 2 24:25

Yeah. I don't know. Do you have a clue all night? I would say. Okay,

Speaker 1 24:31

well James has got [inaudible]

Speaker 2 24:34

well, Bezos is maybe on the younger side, has got a little more energy.

Speaker 1 24:37

It's usually gets pretty, you see the book before and after picture don't become here.

Speaker 2 24:43

Yeah. Well Larry Page, I think he's a high on the hog. He's been there for a long time so I think he's a Bill Gates would probably take out Larry between Phil and Jeff. Yeah. And then a pajama will be last standing.

Speaker 1 24:57

But just the pen is mightier than the sword. I can see both gates sentence second of all kinds of and traps. Whereas [inaudible] is also just pure to shirt off screw itself. That would be the most watched survivor

Speaker 2 25:11

episode you ever? Yes. New Reality showing. So I just will say one thing we didn't, we kind of wrapped up before we had a chance to talk to you about the next level, which is platform as a service. We talked a lot about infrastructure as a service. So I'd like to put my vote in for an upcoming episode very quickly after this. Then we talk about cause and cause I think that my opinion that's a huge differentiator for these cloud platforms going forward. Uh, between AWS, GCP, and Azure, they're all vying for different aspects of what pads and SAS offerings they can provide a, and that's where the real value of the public cloud comes in, is in the PAS and Sas. I asked, that's table stakes. That's no different than a hosting in a Colo. So let's elevate ourselves and let's identify where, where we can take advantage of those, um, pass and SAS offering. So sorry to,

Speaker 1 26:04

and Joliet that, but good comments, breweries back on topic. I, yeah, I need some moderation myself. Um, well occur. Gianna, thank you both for your time this Friday and let's, let's, uh, drove the rest of our evening. Everyone listening, thank you for taking the time, um, to, uh, join them. Join in on the yet to be named as your podcasts with the blue silver shift crew and we'll see you all next Friday.

Speaker 2 26:28

And cheers to our inaugural kickoff.

Speaker 4 26:31

Yes.

Speaker 1 26:39

What does this one for cliff, what does this one foreclose? I should probably say it. Oh, how close will need to view the Mike as well. Um.