Cloud Computing
29 Jan 2019
The growth of network bandwidth and intensive use of the web made cloud computing a highly popular trend. Cloud computing denotes the form of computing performed online by remote servers that allow data sharing, online access and data processing tasks (Miller, 2008). There are several wide-known providers of cloud computing services; two notable players on the market of cloud computing are Amazon with AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Google with Google Apps.
Amazon is a primary provider of cloud computing services; this company offers a variety of virtual servers of different size and capacity. The customers can place their own content, apps and services on the platform, and Amazon is responsible for maintaining the servers and providing access to many users. Amazon is a convenient platform for web developers since it provides a lot of tools and features for deploying web applications.
Google is a leader in many IT spheres one of which is web applications segment of IT industry. Google adopts a different approach to cloud computing and offers a variety of ready applications accessible online. Along with “native” applications, Google offers a convenient environment for creating and deploying own web applications. Furthermore, Google allows to integrate new applications with the existing application suite and user accounts, therefore creating a rich virtual working environment.
Both companies offer similar cloud computing features such as virtual servers with typical or custom parameters (CPU, CPU cores, RAM, storage, load, etc.). Amazon has convenient support of various content and has a lot of options regulating the customer’s use of capacity (Hosseini, 2014). AWS offers a wider variety of instances compared to Google Cloud Engine. However, Google offers lots of ready-to-launch apps, has better input-output speed, more convenient mobile use options and impressive load balancing (Hosseini, 2014).
It is possible to see that Amazon’s marketing strategy targets large companies and enterprises, while Google focuses on targeting smaller companies and individual users. Indeed, according to Czinkota and Ronkainen (2012), AWS is the top used cloud service provider among both SMEs (up to 1,000 employees) and large companies (over 1,000 employees), while Google App Engine and Google Cloud Engine are rated #6 and #8 among cloud computing companies by large enterprises, and #3 and #6 by SMEs. The focus of Amazon’s marketing is on power, scalability and creating a secure platform for web deployment, while Google targets the needs of customers who prefer to use ready apps and benefit from integrating various applications into one network.