Consider Using Google Cloud

Used with permission as GCP Partner

This article does not compare GCP with AWS, nor of course is there any need to promote market-leading AWS.

Instead, if you are considering an alternative to AWS for whatever reason, I would like to recommend considering Google Cloud Platform as opposed to the many others. In full disclosure, my company Thunder Technologies is a proud AWS and GCP partner, and of course opinions here are strictly mine.

All of the public clouds offer a wide range of services. While costs may differ slightly it is difficult to argue that one is significantly less expensive than another. Professional user interfaces, extensive APIs and knowledgeable consulting partners help make the journey to any cloud easier.

Using the cloud however does not remove the need for additional support infrastructure: databases can get corrupted anywhere so you need backup; cloud datacenters are not 100% indestructible so you need a disaster recovery plan; hackers troll everywhere so your workload must be secured.

Ecosystem is what differentiates GCP. No cloud vendor can go at it alone, and developing partnerships with domain experts to provide this additional infrastructure can set a cloud apart from its competitors. Since there rarely is a one-size-fits-all solution — large enterprises might need sophisticated solutions while small businesses look to simpler, more cost-effective approaches — having a variety of ecosystem partners is crucial.

AWS plainly is the leader and the AWS Marketplace is vast. Search for our specialty, disaster recovery, and over 100 solutions appear. Not all of the them are the same, however; some use the cloud as DR backup from on-premise datacenters. Others have a wide array of features for the enterprise. And still others, like our solution Thunder for EC2 ( https://go.aws/35SuxHu), target the small business by providing simple and effective replication of native cloud instances between regions for just a $20 per month flat fee with free trial. Regardless, AWS Marketplace certainly has more than enough disaster recovery solutions for any type of entity using the cloud.

GCP Marketplace has 22 disaster recovery solutions. Certainly not as many as AWS, but these solutions like AWS cover the gamut of scenarios: on-premise to cloud, feature-rich, or, like Thunder for GCP ( https://bit.ly/2XRHU8M), simple, cost-effective automation priced for small and medium businesses.

Cloud marketplaces have parallels to personal online shopping. Think about when you are searching for a consumer product, such as an external hard drive to backup your home PC, on an online marketplace website. If site X has 100 varieties of all types and prices, and site Y has only 20 varieties, but still of most types and prices, both sites could be a satisfactory shopping experience. But if site Z had only 2 or 3, you might not find the product suited for you.

(As an aside, it is curious that AWS Marketplace does not allow users searching for solutions to sort the list by price. For consumer goods, like the disk drive example, probably most people sort by price first; it’s unclear why AWS Marketplace should be any different given that many solutions under one heading may have significantly different target audiences and are priced accordingly. Can anyone answer this?)

Contrast AWS and GCP with, say, Microsoft Azure, which is certainly a full-featured public cloud. However there are no third-party disaster recovery solutions on its marketplace because this feature is provided natively as one of their own services. While this may be an effective strategy it may tend to discourage third parties from developing solutions on Azure, somewhat like an updated cloud version of the cathedral and the bazaar. Still other clouds simply may not have the traction to attract an ecosystem critical mass.

For whatever additional infrastructure your applications need on top of the computing resources that a public cloud provides, AWS has quite plainly more than enough solutions. That said, while GCP does not have the same quantity, Google, unlike other clouds, arguably has a sufficient number of solutions in its marketplace and a sufficient variety to meet the needs of all types of end-users.

Given that our specialty is disaster recovery, it’s worth noting that Google Cloud recently suffered an outage at a few of its regions. While this is certainly a reminder that downtime is possible no matter where your applications are hosted, it is also important to note that Google communicated and corrected the issue reasonably rapidly. In fact, even though we sell failover software, it may have been judicious to ride out the downtime of that short duration: our product helps when the outage is much lengthier, or perhaps permanent, which could happen to anyone.

It bears repeating that, as a proud partner of both AWS and GCP, Thunder Technologies in no way wants to presume to compare the two. Instead, my message is that if you are considering moving to the cloud, in addition to evaluating costs and features of standard computing infrastructure like virtual machines, storage, and networking, make sure a cloud’s ecosystem has a sufficient range of solutions to meet the needs of any additional infrastructure, like backup, DR, and security. AWS most certainly satisfies this requirement, and GCP may be the only other one that does so too.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.