Okay, you say, all fine and good: if AWS is the market leader, and Azure is the momentum player, then why exactly are we reading and writing a book about the Google Cloud Platform? That's an excellent question; in a nutshell, our considered view is that the GCP is a great technology to jump into right now for a few, very rational reasons, as follows:
- Demand-supply: There is a ton of demand for AWS and Azure professionals, but there is also a ton of supply. In contrast, there is growing demand for the GCP, but not yet all that much supply of highly skilled GCP professionals. Careers are made by smart bets on technologies like this one.
- PaaS versus IaaS: Notice how we called out Amazon for being smart in focusing on IaaS early on. That made a lot of sense when cloud computing was new and untested. Now, however, everyone trusts the cloud; that model works, and people know it. This means that folks are now ready to give up control in return for great features. PaaS is attractive now, and GCP's PaaS offerings are very competitive relative to its competitors.
- Kubernetes for hybrid, multi-cloud architectures: You may or may not have heard about this, but Amazon acquired a US-based grocery chain, Whole Foods, some time ago. It gave many current and potential AWS consumers pause for thought, what if Amazon buys up a company in my sector and starts competing with me? As a result, more organizations are likely to want a hybrid, multi-cloud architecture rather than to tie themselves to any one cloud provider. The term hybrid implies that both on-premise data centers and public cloud resources are used, and multi-cloud refers to the fact that more than one cloud provider is in the game. Now, if the world does go the hybrid, multi-cloud way, one clear winner is likely to be a container orchestration technology named Kubernetes. If that does happen, GCP is likely to be a big beneficiary. Kubernetes was developed at Google before being open-sourced, and the GCP offers great support for Kubernetes.