AWS vs Azure vs GCP Price Comparison

Cloud infrastructure pricing has become increasingly complex as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud compete for enterprise workloads. While all three major providers offer similar capabilities, their pricing models differ significantly, with potential cost differences of 20-40% for identical workloads.

Understanding Cloud Pricing Models

All major providers offer on-demand, reserved, and spot/preemptible pricing. On-demand provides maximum flexibility at highest cost. Reserved instances (1-3 year commitments) offer 30-60% discounts. Spot/preemptible instances offer 60-90% discounts but can be terminated with little notice.

Compute Cost Comparison

AWS EC2, Azure VMs, and GCP Compute Engine offer comparable instance types. Generally, GCP offers the most aggressive sustained-use discounts (automatic 30% discount for instances running >25% of month), while AWS offers the deepest reserved instance discounts. Azure pricing tends to be 5-15% higher for comparable compute.

Storage Considerations

Object storage (S3, Azure Blob, GCS) pricing is highly competitive, typically $0.02-0.03/GB/month. However, egress costs (data leaving the cloud) vary significantly: AWS charges $0.09/GB, Azure $0.087/GB, while GCP charges $0.12/GB for standard egress. For data-heavy workloads, this difference compounds.

Multi-Cloud Strategy

Many enterprises adopt multi-cloud strategies to avoid vendor lock-in, leverage best-of-breed services, and negotiate better pricing. However, multi-cloud adds operational complexity and may reduce volume discounts from individual providers.

Hidden Costs to Consider

Beyond headline pricing, consider: data transfer between regions and availability zones, API request charges, premium support costs, and the learning curve for operations teams. AWS's mature ecosystem often means faster deployment, potentially offsetting slightly higher costs.

Right-Sizing and Optimization

Regardless of provider, right-sizing instances is crucial. Studies show 40-60% of cloud instances are oversized. Use provider tools (AWS Compute Optimizer, Azure Advisor, GCP Recommender) to identify optimization opportunities.