Choosing a Cloud Provider

The worst cloud decision isn't picking the wrong provider. It's spending six months evaluating providers instead of building your product.

Here's the dirty secret of cloud provider selection: for 80% of workloads, the differences between AWS, Azure, and GCP matter far less than the blog posts and vendor pitches suggest. All three offer compute, storage, databases, and networking that will serve most applications perfectly well. The real differentiators are narrow and specific.

This article helps you identify whether you're in the 80% (where any provider works) or the 20% (where the choice genuinely matters)—and how to decide either way.

When the Choice Actually Matters

Some situations make one provider clearly superior:

You're a Microsoft shop. If Active Directory, Windows Server, .NET, SQL Server, or Office 365 are central to your operations, Azure isn't just convenient—it's a different category of experience. The integration depth is real. Licensing benefits are real. Fighting against this gravity wastes energy.

You're doing serious machine learning or big data. GCP's BigQuery handles petabyte-scale analytics with a simplicity that still surprises people who've wrestled with other solutions. Google's AI Platform reflects genuine ML expertise. AWS SageMaker is capable but feels more bolted-on. If ML is your core differentiator, test both.

You need infrastructure in specific locations. AWS has 30+ regions. If you need presence in a particular country for latency or compliance, check who actually has data centers there. Don't assume.

You're in a regulated industry. Government, healthcare, and finance have specific compliance certifications. AWS GovCloud, Azure Government, and GCP's government offerings have different approvals. This isn't about preference—it's about what's legally permissible.

Your team has deep expertise in one platform. A team with five years of AWS experience will be more productive on AWS than on GCP, regardless of GCP's technical merits. Retraining costs are real. Institutional knowledge has value.

When the Choice Doesn't Matter Much

For standard web applications, APIs, databases, and storage—the bulk of what most companies build—all three providers are genuinely interchangeable.

You'll find blog posts arguing passionately that Provider X's managed PostgreSQL is superior to Provider Y's. In practice, both will serve your Series A startup's database needs identically. The differences that matter at Google's scale don't matter at yours.

If none of the "actually matters" criteria above apply to you, stop researching and start building. Pick the provider where you have the most existing knowledge, the best credits or discounts, or literally flip a coin. Any of them will work.

The Providers in Brief

AWS is the default. Launched in 2006, largest market share, most comprehensive service catalog (200+ services), biggest community, most Stack Overflow answers. "Nobody gets fired for choosing AWS" is a cliché because it's true. If you have no strong reason to choose otherwise, AWS is fine.

Azure is for Microsoft-centric organizations. The integration benefits aren't marketing fluff—they're architectural reality. Hybrid cloud (connecting on-premise to cloud) is Azure's particular strength. If you're modernizing legacy Windows infrastructure, Azure understands your world.

GCP appeals to engineering-focused teams who value technical elegance. Google invented Kubernetes, and it shows in GKE's polish. The network infrastructure is arguably best-in-class. Pricing is simpler, with automatic sustained-use discounts. The service catalog is smaller but focused on doing fewer things excellently.

Pricing: The Uncomfortable Truth

Cloud pricing is designed to be impossible to compare directly.

Each provider structures costs differently. Data transfer pricing varies wildly. Reserved capacity discounts require different commitments. Enterprise agreements introduce negotiated rates that render published pricing irrelevant.

The only honest way to compare costs: deploy your actual workload on each provider for a month and measure. Pricing calculators are fiction. Real bills are truth.

That said, some patterns hold:

• GCP's automatic sustained-use discounts often make compute cheaper without requiring upfront commitments
• AWS and Azure reserved instances provide deeper discounts but require prediction
• Data transfer costs surprise almost everyone; budget more than you think
• The "free tier" ends, and the bill that follows can shock you

Lock-in: The Overblown Fear

Lock-in anxiety leads to worse decisions than lock-in itself.

Yes, using AWS Lambda means your code won't run on Azure Functions without changes. Yes, migrating databases between providers is painful. Yes, provider-specific services create dependencies.

But consider the alternative: avoiding all provider-specific services means building everything yourself, using only the lowest-common-denominator features, and sacrificing the productivity gains that managed services provide. You'll spend engineering time maintaining infrastructure instead of building product.

The organizations successfully practicing "multi-cloud" are typically doing one of two things:

1. Using one primary provider plus another for specific, narrow use cases
2. Using Kubernetes as an abstraction layer (which has its own complexity costs)

True multi-cloud—running the same workload interchangeably across providers—is expensive, complex, and rarely worth it except for the largest enterprises with specific requirements.

Accept reasonable lock-in. Use provider-specific services when they provide genuine value. The productivity gains usually outweigh the theoretical migration costs you may never incur.

Making the Decision

If you have a clear forcing function (Microsoft ecosystem, specific compliance requirements, existing team expertise, geographic needs), follow it. The decision is already made.

If you don't, here's the honest framework:

1. Do you have cloud credits? Use that provider.
2. Does your team know one platform well? Use that one.
3. Are you a startup? AWS has the largest ecosystem of tools, integrations, and community knowledge.
4. Still unsure? Pick AWS. It's the safe default with the most resources for learning.

Then stop evaluating and start building. The time spent agonizing over marginal differences between providers is time not spent on your actual product.

The Real Risk

The danger isn't choosing Azure when GCP would have been 10% cheaper. The danger is:

• Spending months on evaluation while competitors ship
• Spreading your team thin across multiple providers "to avoid lock-in"
• Over-engineering for scale you don't have yet
• Letting the infrastructure decision become a proxy for other organizational anxieties

Cloud providers are infrastructure. They're important, but they're not your product. Pick one that's reasonable for your situation, learn it deeply, and redirect your energy toward what actually differentiates your business.

The companies winning in the market aren't the ones who chose the optimal cloud provider. They're the ones who chose quickly and built relentlessly.