AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud in 2026: An IT Manager's Comparison

AWS is still the biggest cloud, Azure is the natural fit for Microsoft-heavy organisations, and Google Cloud has gained the most share over the past year, with a strong data and AI story. Most IT managers don't need to crown a winner. What you need is the provider that matches your identity stack, the skills you already have, where your users are and how you plan to pay. For most teams, those four factors settle the question before any feature comparison does.

This guide compares Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud as of September 2026. It covers market share, what each provider does best, a service name map, free tiers, commitment discounts, egress fees, regions near South Asia and a decision checklist. Every figure links to the vendor's own documentation or to Synergy Research Group, and I've left out anything I couldn't verify.

I evaluate these platforms regularly as an IT manager in Bangladesh, where the nearest region and the size of the monthly bill matter as much as the feature list.

Key takeaways

• Market share, Q2 2026: Amazon 28%, Microsoft 20% and Google 15% of worldwide cloud infrastructure services, according to Synergy Research Group. The market grew 43% year on year to $143.4 billion for the quarter.
• Free tiers differ in shape: AWS gives new accounts up to $200 in credits over 6 months, Azure gives $200 for 30 days plus 12 months of selected free services, and Google Cloud gives $300 for 90 days.
• Commitment discounts are the real price list: up to 72% with AWS EC2 Instance Savings Plans, up to 72% with Azure Reserved VM Instances, up to 65% with Azure savings plan for compute, and up to 55% (70% for memory-optimised machines) with Google resource-based committed use discounts.
• Egress still costs money: AWS and Azure each include the first 100 GB of internet egress per month. AWS and Google Cloud waive transfer fees when you leave them for good, but only through a formal request process.
• No provider has a region in Bangladesh. All three run regions in India and Singapore, so test latency from your own users before choosing.

Who leads the cloud market in 2026?

AWS leads, but its lead is shrinking. Synergy Research Group's Q2 2026 report, published on 30 July 2026, puts worldwide cloud infrastructure service revenue at $143.4 billion for the quarter. Growth reached 43% year on year, which Synergy calls "the highest in the last eight years." Amazon held 28% of the market, Microsoft 20% and Google 15%.

Compare that with Synergy's Q3 2025 figures: Amazon 29%, Microsoft 20% and Google 13%. Synergy notes that "Amazon's market share has gradually eroded, while both Microsoft and Google have been gaining share." The same report says the three together accounted for 63% of spending.

For a buying decision, share alone means little: all three are large and staying put. Size and momentum can matter when you're hiring or choosing third-party tools, so check how easy it is to find people and vendors who support your shortlist. It shouldn't outweigh a good fit with your existing systems.

What is each provider best at?

AWS: breadth and ecosystem

AWS is the largest provider and has the broadest catalogue of services. Its Region list is also long: the AWS Regions documentation lists 34 Regions for standard accounts. For generative AI, Amazon Bedrock "gives you access to hundreds of FMs from leading AI companies," so you're not tied to one model vendor.

Azure: Microsoft integration and licensing

Azure's strongest argument is everything you already run from Microsoft. Identity lives in Microsoft Entra ID, which Microsoft maps to AWS IAM in its Azure for AWS professionals guide. Licensing is the other big lever. Azure Hybrid Benefit lets you bring Windows Server and SQL Server licences with active Software Assurance to Azure. It also allows 180 days of migration time, during which the licences can run on-premises and in Azure at once. If your organisation lives in Microsoft 365, the same identity and admin model carries over. I covered that side in my Microsoft 365 Copilot guide for small businesses.

Google Cloud: data, containers and AI

Google Cloud is known for BigQuery, Google Kubernetes Engine and its AI platform. That platform changed names this year. Google's announcement of 23 April 2026 describes Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform as "the evolution of Vertex AI," with access to more than 200 models through Model Garden, including Anthropic's Claude models alongside Gemini.

AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud: service name mapping

This table uses the providers' own mappings: Google's AWS, Azure and Google Cloud service comparison and Microsoft's compute and AI and machine learning comparisons.

Microsoft's own caveat applies to every row: "not every matched service has exact feature-for-feature parity." Use the table to translate conversations, then read the docs for the specific feature you depend on.

How do the free tiers compare?

All three offer credits for new accounts, but the durations differ a lot, and that changes how you should run a trial.

Sources: the AWS Free Tier page, the Azure free account page and Google Cloud's free features documentation, all checked on 25 September 2026.

Two details matter in practice. On AWS, the free plan account "closes on its own 6 months after you open it or when your credits run out, whichever comes first," and you're not charged unless you upgrade to a paid plan. Azure's 30 days go quickly, so plan your test first. Google's always-free Compute Engine and Cloud Storage allowances are tied to US regions, so they're good for learning, not for hosting a production workload close to South Asian users.

What do commitment discounts actually save?

On-demand prices are the ceiling, not what steady workloads usually pay. Each provider discounts heavily if you commit to one or three years of usage.

Sources: AWS Savings Plans pricing, Azure Reserved VM Instances and savings plan for compute, and Google's committed use discounts and sustained use discounts documentation.

Read the fine print before counting on the headline number. Google's sustained use discounts don't apply to E2 machines, and they "don't apply to the resource usage that is already covered by committed use discounts," so the two don't stack. Azure lets you hold reservations and a savings plan at the same time. Your real saving depends on how much of your usage is truly steady.

My rule of thumb: run a new workload on demand for a couple of months, look at the baseline it never drops below, and commit only to that. Anything spiky stays on demand.

Egress fees: the cost you only notice later

Data going out to the internet is where cloud bills most often surprise people, because it grows with your traffic rather than with the servers you chose.

• AWS: "AWS customers receive 100 GB of free data transfer out to the internet free each month, aggregated across all AWS Services and Regions (except China and GovCloud)," according to the EC2 on-demand pricing page.
• Azure: the bandwidth pricing page lists the first 100 GB per month free, then $0.087 per GB for the next 10 TB routed over Microsoft's network from North America and Europe. Other source regions are priced differently, so check yours.
• Google Cloud: internet egress is billed by tier and destination on the network pricing page. The free tier includes only small allowances, such as 1 GB per month of outbound transfer from North America for Compute Engine, according to the free features documentation.

Leaving a provider is a special case. Google announced on 12 January 2024 that it would waive data transfer fees for customers migrating off Google Cloud. Its exit program requires you to submit an Exit Notice and to end your agreement for the Google Cloud services you're leaving. AWS followed on 5 March 2024: you contact AWS Support, and once approved, "we will provide credits for the data being migrated." Neither waiver lowers your day-to-day egress bill. They only apply when you're moving out.

If your workload serves lots of static content, a CDN or an edge platform in front of the origin often matters more than the cloud's egress rate. That's one reason this site runs on Cloudflare, as described in my Cloudflare D1 guide.

Which regions are closest to Bangladesh and South Asia?

None of the three lists a region in Bangladesh, so every Bangladeshi workload is served from another country. India and Singapore are the usual choices. Here's what each provider's official list shows as of September 2026:

Sources: AWS Regions, list of Azure regions and Google Cloud regions and zones.

A few things the table doesn't show. On AWS, Regions launched after 20 March 2019, including Hyderabad, must be enabled before you can use them. On Azure, Central India, India South Central and Southeast Asia have three availability zones, while the list shows none for South India and West India. That matters if you want zone-redundant deployments inside India. And not every service is available in every region, so check the specific services you need.

Don't choose on geography alone. Actual latency depends on how your users' ISPs route traffic, which can make a region that looks closer on the map slower in practice. Run a small VM in each candidate region during a trial and measure from your users' networks. Data residency or sector rules may also point you to a specific country, so check those first. My post on IT management best practices in Bangladesh covers the local context around that.

How should an IT manager choose? A decision checklist

Work through these in order. Most organisations have a clear answer by step four.

1. Start with identity. If staff already sign in with Microsoft Entra ID and you run Microsoft 365, Azure removes a whole integration project. If you're on Google Workspace, give Google Cloud a close look.
2. Count your licences. If you own Windows Server or SQL Server licences with Software Assurance, price Azure with Hybrid Benefit before comparing anything else.
3. Check your team's skills. The provider your engineers already know is usually cheaper than a small discount elsewhere. Training and mistakes cost real money.
4. Pick candidate regions and measure latency from your users' networks, not from a map.
5. Price the steady baseline with commitments, using each provider's calculator, and price egress with your real traffic numbers.
6. List the managed services you'll depend on, such as the database engine, Kubernetes, the data warehouse or the AI models, and confirm each is available in your chosen region.
7. Check your third-party tools. Your backup, monitoring and security vendors should support the provider natively.
8. Plan the exit on day one. Keep infrastructure as code, use open formats for data and know how you'd request the provider's exit waiver.
9. Set budgets and cost alerts before the first workload goes live. A forgotten test cluster is an easy way to get a surprise bill.

For small workloads, none of the three may be the right answer. A single business application, such as an ERP, often runs well on a plain VPS. I walk through that option in deploying Odoo on a VPS with PostgreSQL.

Is multicloud worth it?

Usually not for a small or mid-sized team, at least not as a first move. Two clouds means two sets of identity, networking, monitoring and skills to maintain, plus egress fees whenever data moves between them.

Multicloud makes more sense in narrower forms:

• Best-of-breed services: your main platform on one provider, with a single managed service, such as a data warehouse or an AI model, from another.
• SaaS that already runs elsewhere: Microsoft 365 on Microsoft's cloud while your custom apps run on AWS is multicloud in practice, and it's perfectly normal.
• Backups: keeping a copy of critical data with a second provider protects you from an account-level problem without running live workloads twice.

If you do go multicloud, standardise on portable tools such as Kubernetes and infrastructure as code. For the AI side of that toolkit, see my roundup of AI tools for IT managers in 2026.

FAQ

Which cloud provider has the largest market share in 2026?

AWS. Synergy Research Group's Q2 2026 data puts Amazon at 28% of worldwide cloud infrastructure services, Microsoft at 20% and Google at 15%. Amazon's share has been slowly falling while Microsoft and Google have gained ground.

Is Azure cheaper than AWS?

It depends on the workload. On list prices the maximum commitment discounts are similar: up to 72% for AWS EC2 Instance Savings Plans and for Azure Reserved VM Instances. Azure often comes out ahead for Windows Server and SQL Server workloads when you can use Azure Hybrid Benefit with existing licences. For everything else, price your actual configuration in each provider's calculator.

Does AWS, Azure or Google Cloud have a data centre region in Bangladesh?

No. As of September 2026, none of the three lists a region in Bangladesh. The nearest options are in India (Mumbai on all three, plus Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai or Delhi depending on the provider) and Singapore. Measure latency from your users' networks before you choose.

Which cloud has the best free tier?

For a short trial, Google Cloud's $300 over 90 days gives the most credit and the most time. AWS gives up to $200 over 6 months, and Azure gives $200 for 30 days plus 12 months of selected free services. All three also have always-free allowances that are useful for learning but too small for production.

What happened to Google Vertex AI?

Google reorganised it. In April 2026 Google introduced Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, which it describes as "the evolution of Vertex AI." It adds agent building and governance, with more than 200 models in Model Garden.

If you're weighing a move to AWS, Azure or Google Cloud and want an independent view on the trade-offs, get in touch here.