Google is making strides in closing the gaps with AWS and Microsoft, even though it is the smaller of the Big 3 cloud infrastructure vendors. GCP offers a compelling infrastructure, flexible pricing and a home for enterprises (namely retail firms) that compete directly with Amazon.
However, Google still lags in terms of account coverage of the Fortune 500, especially in verticals such as banking and government. Gartner appears to agree. In its August 2016 Cloud Infrastructure report, Gartner argued that "Google is still in the rudimentary stages of learning to engage with enterprise and midmarket customers, especially those that are not technology-centric businesses."
GCP is perceived as a ?by engineers, for engineers? service and is not the first choice of most large enterprises for hosting legacy IT workloads. GCP, for instance, is not yet certified to run Oracle databases and was only recently (relative to AWS) fully enabled to run Windows Server workloads. Google architecture is really built for homogenous workloads, and Amazon has been built for heterogeneous workloads. Will the Google architecture work for workloads that are not as predictable as their own workloads? I don't know, time will tell. I think they're so smart they'll figure it out.
GCP has a solid and well-implemented core of fundamental IaaS and PaaS capabilities, but its feature set and scope of services are not as broad as that of the market leaders. It is still missing key capabilities that are important to established organizations (along with missing some capabilities that are important to startups), such as user management suitable for large organizations, granular and customizable role-based access control (RBAC), complex network topologies equivalent to those in enterprise data centers, and software licensing via a marketplace and license-portability agreements.
