GCP

Google Cloud Platform is Google's cloud offering. GCP has historically been strongest in data analytics, machine learning infrastructure, and containerized workloads — BigQuery and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) are leading products in their respective categories.

For general enterprise infrastructure work, GCP is the least common of the three major clouds in mid-market environments. Where it tends to appear: organizations with heavy data engineering or ML workloads, companies deeply integrated with Google Workspace that want a native cloud extension, or teams that standardized on Kubernetes early.

One architectural difference worth knowing: GCP uses a global VPC model by default, where a single VPC spans all regions. AWS and Azure use regional VPCs. This can be a meaningful advantage for distributed workloads — or a surprise for teams coming from the other platforms.

The practical guidance: if you don't have a specific reason to be on GCP, you're likely better served by Azure (if Microsoft-first) or AWS (if cloud-native or vendor-neutral). GCP's pricing is competitive and its Kubernetes offering is the strongest of the three, but those advantages only matter if your workloads require them.