Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Amazon Web Services (AWS)? It’s the comparison most IT decision makers are facing today when evaluating the ever-increasing complexities of public cloud providers. There’s a lot to dissect when comparing and contrasting cloud offerings from Google Cloud and AWS — from historical misconceptions and true cost comparisons, to customers’ real-world experiences in planning and deployment.
Many of our customers have shared their experiences in various cloud environments, and the overwhelming trends tell a big story: Google Cloud isn’t just an alternative to AWS, but for many use cases, it’s a far superior choice. Here are 5 SADA customers who explain why they decided to make the move from AWS to GCP:
1. Customer: MakerBot
Industry: Software & Technology; Manufacturing
Primary reasons for switching from AWS to GCP: Reduced costs; increased scalability; Improved performance
MakerBot, one of the largest desktop 3D printer manufacturers, decided to migrate from AWS to GCP to better support its Thingiverse community, which downloads 20 million files a month. MakerBot’s DevOps and Web teams decided that migrating to GCP would significantly reduce expenses, increase scalability and boost performance to deliver a better user experience.
SADA went all in with MakerBot, planning, executing and completing the massive project in eight weeks, with downtime limited to just four hours. The team also moved MakerBot’s hosted Kubernetes cluster from AWS’ EC2 to Google Kubernetes Engine which eliminated the company’s scalability issues.
“Simply stated, the networking part of Google is a lot simpler to understand than AWS, and it is a lot less expensive. We are using it as our main deployment method, our container orchestration service, as well as our main web service infrastructure. It removes the pain of actually hosting everything and eliminates previous scalability issues.”
Erik Ahrend, Lead Cloud Architect, MakerBot
Among other benefits, MakerBot achieved 30% cost savings per month compared to AWS and was able to serve more customers with less latency.
Read the full customer story to learn more.
2. Customer: Axonify
Industry: Software & Technology
Primary reason for switching from AWS to GCP: Competitive concerns fueled by retail customers
Axonify, a frontline training and communications solution, was born cloud native to AWS but like many cloud native providers that serve the retail industry, the company increasingly felt pressured not to deal with their customers’ direct competition-Amazon. To eliminate its conflict of interest and increase customer peace of mind, Axonify made a strategic decision to cut the cord with AWS and move to GCP.
“We do so much business in the retail industry, and a lot of our customers can be quite vocal about the commercial angle of competing with Amazon, yet we were writing a check to the company for hosting their data on AWS. That principle was difficult to swallow for some CIOs.”
Phil Menary, Senior Vice President of Software Development, Axonify
Axonify performed extensive due diligence and met with many leading cloud hosting providers, including Google Cloud, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. “The Google folks were great and quick to engage. They brought in an architect and really tried to help us understand what they were offering and what was possible on GCP,” said Menary. “It was a level of service we hadn’t been receiving from AWS.”
Read the full customer story to learn more.
3. Customer: FoodJets
Industry: Software & Technology
Primary reasons for switching from AWS to GCP: Ease of use; AI/ML innovations; Security
Startup food delivery platform, FoodJets, had been using AWS for four years until its CTO learned more about Google Cloud and its benefits. To enable flexibility and innovation, the company didn’t want app devs bogged down in infrastructure management tasks; it wanted them to be able to write, enhance and scale applications without having to wrestle with overhead–moving to GCP enabled FoodJets’ team to do exactly that.
“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.”
Veer Singh, CTO, FoodJets
FoodJets staff can now do a lot more in less time, which means they have the bandwidth to develop new services and features to drive a better experience for their customers.
“Other services, like AWS, didn’t give us anywhere near the customer service we get from SADA and Google Cloud, and the GCP infrastructure and services have been running flawlessly. We have no complaints.”
Veer Singh, CTO, FoodJets
Read the full customer story to learn more.
4. Customer: ME.ME
Industry: Software & Technology
Primary reasons for switching from AWS to GCP: Reduced costs; Increased efficiency; Security
ME.ME, a content aggregation website that indexes internet memes from various online communities and social networking sites, had been using AWS for about three years when they started looking into switching cloud providers. The company wanted to reduce the time they spent having to actively maintain their cloud servers. Configuring security permissions was particularly vexing. The company was also looking to cut costs and increase efficiency, and their ever-increasing AWS bills were a major issue.
With GCP, ME.ME enjoys a competitively priced solution that leverages managed service without vendor lock-in and allows for auto-sizing based on demand, with minimal administrative overhead. As they approached their first full month post-migration, the company was on track to see a 30% to 35% decrease in costs. The company also reports spending far less time on security and getting better results.
“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. They did the right thing when they enabled experienced partners, like SADA, to help implement and optimize their technology.”
Jim Hefner, CTO, ME.ME
Read the full customer story to learn more.
5. Customer: Visby
Industry: Software & Technology
Primary reasons for switching from AWS to GCP: Increased scalability; AI/ML innovations; Ease of use
Visby is a startup with a mission to “capture the real world and play it back” using holographic imaging software. Visby had been running its video processing pipeline on AWS for about three years when it ran into problems. While doing a massive ML deployment, Visby encountered issues procuring GPUs, along with delays between requesting compute resources and computation actually starting.
“In AWS, we couldn’t commission resources whenever we wanted to. 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.”
Ryan Damm, CEO and Co-Founder, Visby
Visby decided to migrate to GCP because of its ML capabilities and ease of use. SADA worked with Visby to ensure it overcame the scaling challenges it had encountered on AWS, and to position Visby to take advantage of Google’s unique hardware offerings to accelerate what is possible in mainstream light field technology use cases.
The results were immediately impactful:
- With no scaling limitations, video processing has sped up 100x
- Visby found GCP to be considerably faster than AWS for the same amount of compute power – saving time and money
