A cloud platform can be described as a storage place that is highly accessible, flexible, scalable and agile in all its characteristics. Users from anywhere via the internet can access their data, collaborate, share, and work together in real-time with the cloud, which means anything less than a cloud platform cannot be possible to comprehend today. The substantial dominance of cloud platforms is their authenticity and usability.
Globally, collective spending on the cloud is becoming a mainstream business proposition. Based on the latest report from Gartner, end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 23.1% in 2021 to total $332.3 billion, up from $270 billion in 2020. As the scope of business is increasingly progressing in the cloud, the investment in cloud platforms soars high.
Today, organizations are blessed with different types of cloud platforms, which varies in their capabilities and competencies. In this blog, let’s explore the major players in the Cloud industry and their services in brief.
Types of Cloud Platforms
There are various types of clouds available, and they can all offer different capabilities. The three main types of cloud computing are:
- Public cloud
- Private cloud
- Hybrid cloud
The leaders or dominant names in the Cloud platforms providers are three,
Amazon Web Services – which is still growing and have a net worth of $250 Billion, and it has 33% of cloud infrastructure market share
Microsoft Azure- which has a market share of 18% of the total cloud platform and has a total worth of $5 billion
Google cloud platform- which is a latecomer and a have a market share of 4.6%
The competition for the leadership of cloud platforms is going between these three big shots. We can clearly say that these three companies hold the lead in the infrastructure as a service (Iaas) and platform as a service (PaaS) market.
| AWS | Azure | Google Cloud |
Services |
|
|
|
Amazon Web Services- AWS
AWS is a rampant growing toolset, and its potential is incomparable. AWS is the dominating the sector of cloud platforms for the last 10 years. It gives more priority to the public cloud than the private and hybrid, which is the biggest strength of AWS. The interoperating with your data centre doesn’t come in the priority list of AWS. The major reason for its dominance is its large scope of operations and many available services.
AWS has one of the most extensive networks of data centres around the world. It is the most mature cloud platform that is an enterprise-ready provider with the potential for controlling many users and providing support for large organizations. The global reach of AWS makes things easier for them. The biggest cons of Amazon Web Services are their cost. Even though they are reducing their cost, many users feel it challenging to find out their cost structure. As they provide more services than other platforms, it had become more difficult to use. It is overloaded with overwhelming options, making users confused about choosing a particular cost package for their needs. However, the cons of AWS are getting outbalanced by the pros. Organizations of all sizes can use AWS by opting for the correct package to complete various workloads.
The storage services provided by AWS are
- Simple Storage services
- Elastic book storage
- Elastic file system
- Storage Gateway
- Snowball
- Snowball Edge
- Snowmobile
Database Services are
- Aurora
- Rds
- Dynamo DB
- ElastiCache
- Redshift
- Neptune
- Database migration services
Backup services are
- Glacier
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft is the major competitor to AWS with a large proficiency in cloud structure. The premium offering of Azure is that it speaks your language if you are an Enterprise customer. It is also the second-largest cloud provider available. Microsoft Azure gives more importance to the Hybrid cloud, and it is the core strength of Azure. Interoperating with your data centre comes as the top priority of Microsoft Azure as many companies have a data centre with them. Microsoft Azure will be a great platform for them to interoperate. Microsoft came to cloud platform very lately, but they had used their already existing software for a jump start. They had used Windows Server, Office, SQL Server, SharePoint, Dynamics Active Directory, .Net, etc., for the cloud.
The biggest reason behind the success of Azure is that it is tightly integrated with Microsoft applications. A large number of enterprises uses Windows and other software of Microsoft. These enterprises felt that using Microsoft Azure is easier to use when using other Microsoft software for their work. That increased the reliability of Azure for the existing users of Microsoft. And if an existing Microsoft customer is buying Azure package, they can expect a significant discount on their contracts. On the other side, it has some drawbacks. Microsoft Azure is an enterprise-ready platform, as said by Microsoft while introducing. The customers don’t feel so after using it. In customers opinion, it is not a completely Enterprise-ready platform. Customers reported issues with technical support, Documentation, Training and breadth of independent software vendor (ISV).
The storage services provided by Azure are
- Blop storage
- Queue storage
- File storage
- Disk storage
- Data Lake Storage
Database Services are
- SQL Database
- Database for MySQL
- Database for PostgreSQL
- Data Warehouse
- Server Stretch Database
- Cosmos Database
- Table storage
- Redis Cache
- Data Factory
Backup services are
- Archive Storage
- Backup
- Site recovery
Google Cloud
The latecomer in the platform field and still managed to get into the top three is Google Cloud. Google Cloud is one of the most funded platforms. This helped them obtain technical expertise and leading tools like Deep learning, Artificial intelligence, Machine learning, and data analytics. Which helped google to advance in the platform competition significantly. Google Cloud doesn’t prioritize enterprises, which helped draw the attention of corporate customers. Google cloud is designed for cloud-native businesses. Google has a better offering in containers because Google developed the Kubernetes standard. This is what AWS and Azure nowadays offer. Google shows commitment to open source and portability. Google cloud give more importance to high computing offers like Analytics, Big Data and Machine learning.
It possesses a large volume of DevOps Expertise. Google knows the data centres, and it will provide a fast response to offer considerable scale and load balancing. Even though the Google Cloud platform is in the third position in the market, it is quickly expanding both its offerings and its footprint of universal datacenters. Google provide more discount to the users and also makes a flexible contract with users. On the con side, Google got third in market share because it doesn’t possess a traditional relationship with enterprise customers. Th google offers fewer features and services when compared to the other competitors in the markets, such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Late entry also made things difficult for them because they have to give more advanced supports than present in the market.
The storage services provided by AWS are
- Cloud Storage
- Persistent Disk
- Transfer Appliance
- Transfer service
Database Services are
- Cloud SQL
- Cloud Bigtable
- Cloud Spanner
- Cloud Datastore
Backup services provided by Google Cloud Platform
- Nearline
- Coldline