Choosing a cloud platform is one of the most consequential infrastructure decisions a growing business will make. Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud each have distinct strengths — and the right choice depends on your existing stack, your team's expertise, and your growth trajectory.
AWS: The Market Leader
Amazon Web Services dominates cloud market share for good reason. Its breadth of services is unmatched — from EC2 compute instances to Lambda serverless functions to over 200 managed services. If you need a specific cloud capability, AWS almost certainly offers it.
Best for: Companies that need maximum flexibility, startups using the AWS free tier, teams with existing AWS expertise.
Watch out for: Cost complexity. AWS billing is notoriously difficult to predict, and unused resources can silently drain budgets. We've seen clients paying 3-4x what they should because nobody audited their reserved instances.
Azure: The Enterprise Choice
Microsoft Azure is the natural choice for organizations already invested in the Microsoft ecosystem — Office 365, Active Directory, SQL Server, .NET. The integration is seamless, and Azure's hybrid cloud capabilities (Azure Arc, Azure Stack) are best-in-class for companies that need to bridge on-premise and cloud infrastructure.
Best for: Microsoft shops, enterprises with compliance requirements, organizations that need hybrid cloud, .NET applications.
Watch out for: Azure's portal UX can be overwhelming, and some services have confusing naming conventions. The learning curve is steeper than it needs to be.
Google Cloud Platform: The Data Play
GCP shines in data analytics, machine learning, and containerized workloads. BigQuery remains the gold standard for serverless data warehousing, and GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine) is widely considered the best managed Kubernetes offering.
Best for: Data-heavy workloads, machine learning projects, companies running containerized microservices, organizations using Google Workspace.
Watch out for: Smaller service catalog than AWS/Azure. Google has a reputation for sunsetting products, which makes some enterprises nervous about long-term commitment.
Our Recommendation
At Crux Technologies, we are cloud-agnostic by design. We deploy on whichever platform best serves the project — and sometimes that means multi-cloud architectures where different services run on different providers.
For most small to mid-size businesses, we recommend starting with Azure if you are a Microsoft shop, AWS if you need maximum flexibility, or GCP if your primary workload is data analytics.
The platform matters less than the architecture. A well-designed system on any of these platforms will outperform a poorly designed system on all three combined. That is what we focus on: getting the architecture right first, then choosing the infrastructure to support it.
Want help choosing the right cloud strategy for your project? Get in touch — we will map the route together.