As Vietnam accelerates its digital transformation, selecting the right cloud provider has become a strategic decision that directly impacts both operational efficiency and business growth. By 2025, enterprises are navigating a complex landscape where AI/ML workloads are expanding, web-based transaction systems are scaling rapidly, and real-time analytics is becoming mission-critical. Choosing between AWS, GCP, and Azure is no longer just about cost—it determines how effectively a business can handle high traffic, ensure service reliability, and scale efficiently.

For startups and SMEs, the right cloud can be the difference between staying within budget and incurring unforeseen costs across compute, storage, and network egress. For larger enterprises, the focus shifts toward multi-region reliability, compliance, and ecosystem support. This report benchmarks AWS, GCP, and Azure across these critical dimensions, providing Vietnamese businesses with actionable insights for informed, data-driven cloud decisions.

Key takeaway: Choosing the right cloud is about matching your business profile, growth trajectory, and workload requirements to each platform’s strengths — ensuring both cost efficiency and operational resilience in 2025 and beyond.

Quick Summary: Cloud Selection by Business Needs

• AWS: Leads in ecosystem maturity and reliability. Best for enterprises requiring high uptime, multi-AZ deployment, and a comprehensive suite of monitoring and security tools.

• GCP: Excels in compute and egress cost optimization, ideal for startups, SMEs, and data/ML teams leveraging BigQuery and AI/ML services.

• Azure: Perfect for organizations using Microsoft stack (AD, O365, SQL Server), offering seamless integration and reduced operational friction; careful license planning is critical to control costs.

In short: startups seeking cost efficiency → GCP; large enterprises requiring high uptime → AWS; Microsoft stack organizations → Azure.

Cloud Market Context in Vietnam 2025

According to 2024–Q1/2025 IaaS data, AWS maintains market leadership, though growth has slowed, while Microsoft and Google are accelerating, contributing to a 22.5% global IaaS growth in 2024. Major cloud providers are investing heavily: Amazon spends over $100 billion annually on data centers and AI/compute infrastructure, intensifying competition in both cost and capacity. Gartner SCPS 2025 continues to rank AWS as a Leader, confirming its enterprise cloud dominance.

Analysis: Vietnamese businesses must consider future scalability and high-availability needs, not just current costs, especially for workloads with low-latency requirements in Southeast Asia.

Recommended Benchmark Methodology

To evaluate performance, costs, and reliability, internal tests could include:

• Workload: web transaction and API application with 70/30 read/write ratio, 1,000–50,000 RPS traffic.

• Infrastructure: minimum 4 vCPU, 16GB RAM, 200GB SSD, autoscaling enabled.

• Metrics: p95/p99 latency, throughput, cost per 1,000 requests, 5xx errors, scale-out time, and SLA/SLO comparison.

• Test regions: AWS ap-southeast-1/2, GCP asia-southeast1/2, Azure southeastasia/eastasia, reflecting realistic local latency.

Note: Results vary by instance family, region, discount plans, and workload data. Treat this benchmark as a decision-making framework, not absolute scoring.

Results & Analysis

1. Reliability and SLA

AWS offers a 99.99% SLA for multi-AZ deployments, providing a solid foundation for enterprise SLOs. Financial and transactional enterprises can adopt AWS Well-Architected Reliability Pillar best practices, including multi-AZ deployment, automatic recovery, and chaos testing, to minimize downtime risk.

Analysis: High SLA maintenance under traffic spikes makes AWS ideal for high-availability workloads, mitigating service disruptions and supporting strict latency/error budget SLOs.

2. Cloud Costs: Compute, Storage, Egress, and Licensing

GCP stands out for cost-effective compute and egress, suitable for startups and SMEs. AWS and Azure optimize costs through Savings Plans or Committed Use Discounts. Note: GCP egress pricing changed in early 2024—monitor data flow, CDN usage, and network paths to avoid unexpected charges. Azure licensing for Windows Server and SQL Server can significantly impact TCO; planning is essential under pay-as-you-go or Azure Arc models.

Analysis: Startups and SMEs prioritizing short-term TCO reduction may prefer GCP for containerized/stateless workloads. Enterprises using Windows/SQL workloads need detailed Azure licensing calculations to prevent hidden costs and ensure accurate budget forecasting.

3. Service Ecosystem & Workload Fit

Mapping services across AWS, GCP, and Azure (compute, database, AI/ML, networking) enables smoother multi-cloud or migration planning. CNCF Survey 2024 shows increasing maturity in Kubernetes and containers, reflecting demand for portability and observability.

Analysis: Microsoft stack enterprises benefit from Azure’s seamless integration. Data/ML-heavy organizations gain advantages with GCP (BigQuery, AI/ML). AWS remains strong for multi-region/multi-AZ deployments with comprehensive observability, security, and networking tools.

Recommendations by Business Profile

• Startup / SME: GCP optimizes initial costs and supports containerized/stateless workloads; monitor egress and observability costs early.

• Large Enterprise (>10x growth) requiring high uptime: AWS offers reliable SLA, mature multi-AZ infrastructure, and extensive tools for reliability optimization.

• Microsoft Stack Enterprises: Azure reduces integration friction; conduct detailed Windows/SQL license analysis across load scenarios for predictable TCO.

Cloud Selection Roadmap

FAQ

1. Which cloud is suitable for Vietnamese startups in 2025?

→ GCP optimizes compute/egress costs and supports data/ML workloads efficiently.

2. What is AWS’s actual SLA?

→ EC2 SLA is 99.99% for multi-AZ deployments, ensuring high availability for large enterprises.

3. How to optimize Azure licensing costs?

→ Prepare detailed Windows/SQL license tables across different load scenarios; consider pay-as-you-go via Azure Arc.

Access the “Full Vietnam-region POC Report”: Slitigenz sets up parallel infrastructures on AWS, GCP, and Azure, measures p95/p99 latency, cost per 1,000 requests, and provides optimization recommendations for informed cloud decisions.