Picking a Cloud in 2026: AWS vs Azure vs GCP

There's no universally 'best' cloud in 2026 — there's a best cloud for your team, your stack and your compliance posture. Clients who ask us for a scoreboard usually end up disappointed; clients who ask us for a decision framework ship faster.

AWS remains the default for breadth: the widest service catalogue, the deepest hiring pool, and the most mature ecosystem of third-party tooling. It's the safe, defensible choice when you don't yet know exactly what you'll need — which is most early-stage products.

Azure earns its place when your organisation already runs on Microsoft — Active Directory, Office 365, .NET shops with existing enterprise agreements. The identity and compliance tooling integrates in ways that save real months on regulated projects, and the enterprise sales relationship often already exists.

GCP is our recommendation when data and AI are the product, not a feature. BigQuery's analytics performance, Vertex AI's model tooling, and genuinely excellent Kubernetes primitives (GKE is still the reference implementation) make it the strongest platform for data-intensive and ML-heavy workloads.

In practice, we run a short scoring exercise with every client: team familiarity, existing vendor relationships, compliance requirements, data gravity, and projected spend at 10x scale. The 'best' cloud is the one that scores highest against your constraints — not the one with the best conference keynote.