Google Cloud vs Microsoft Azure
Both appear in 4 sections: compute, object storage, egress, footprint. Microsoft Azure is cheaper on 4 of 5 comparable measures.
Google Cloud and Azure are close enough on storage that other factors decide. Cloud Storage Standard is $0.020/GB-month against Blob Storage Hot at $0.018, so Azure is marginally cheaper. Egress separates them more clearly: GCP charges $0.12/GB after 200 GB free each month, Azure $0.087/GB. Azure is roughly 27% cheaper per gigabyte served, though GCP's larger free allowance means very small workloads may pay nothing either way. On a workload serving 5 TB a month, GCP costs about $576 in egress and Azure about $435. Operations are near-identical, GCP at $0.005 per thousand writes and Azure at $0.0055. Both are expensive against the providers in Pikkly's egress table that charge nothing. Neither of these platforms is usually chosen on storage pricing. Azure's case is organisational: if you run Active Directory, Microsoft 365 or SQL Server, the integration and licence portability are worth more than any per-gigabyte difference, and enterprise agreements often change the effective price anyway. GCP's case is specific products, principally BigQuery, plus Kubernetes expertise and a network built by a company that already moves enormous volumes of traffic. The pricing here is close enough that it should be a tiebreaker rather than a reason.
Compute
All compute →Object storage
All object storage →Egress
All egress →Footprint
All footprint →| Metric | Google Cloud | Microsoft Azure |
|---|---|---|
| Regionshigher is better | 25Cheaper25 countries | 87 countries |
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