Companies that are able to provide Cloud Computing do so by allowing companies and individuals to rent on demand processing power, storage, and software over the internet. While there are many companies that provide this service, in 2016 there are really only four major cloud vendors: Amazon, Microsoft, Google and IBM.
Amazon introduced its could computing platform Amazon Web Service (AWS) over a decade ago and it has quickly become the most widely used. Making $7.9bn in revenue last year, it is expected to grow by as much as 50% this year. Amazon operates its services within 16 different regions across the world. As of a year ago, AWS offered more than 70 separate services across the company. These include but are not limited to analytics, networking, storage, computation etc.
Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Services takes second place, but maybe moving up. Its division grew by 140% last year. This cloud computing provides software, a platform and infrastructure as services, while in the same time supporting multiple programming languages, along with tools and frameworks.
While Google “essentially” invented cloud computing by building huge data centers, the company arrived late in making this offering to other companies – so they fell behind. Google does not reveal it’s cloud revenues but it was estimated at $500m last year (< 10% of Amazon’s). This was first used internally to boost their products such as Google Search and YouTube. It is also worth noting that Google Cloud Platform is very similar to Amazon Web Services, more so than Microsoft Azure is.
The following graph is is of the Cloud Market Share in 2016.
We can clearly notice Amazon’s lead over the other providers of similar services and it interesting from the perspective of who was the first on the market versus who joined late the market yet surpassed all of the competitors.
You can visit the providers mentioned above by clicking on the following links:
Sources:
Images:
- Cloud wars: Google, Amazon and Microsoft battle to own the future of computing
- https://cloud.google.com/_static/7fa22d3393/images/cloud/gcp-logo.svg
- https://cdn.worldvectorlogo.com/logos/microsoft-azure-2.svg
- https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1d/AmazonWebservices_Logo.svg/2000px-AmazonWebservices_Logo.svg.png
Cloud Computing 
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