Top Cloud Service Providers In 2022

There's significant momentum around the public cloud sectors as organizations using cloud services increase cloud spending in the wake of COVID-19. Cloud computing has dramatically transformed the world in the last decade as on-premise architecture started migrating to the cloud. At the same time, other cloud service providers are also emerging to solve business needs. But, inarguably, these three giants facilitate the boom in demand by holding their fortress.

Technologies like Iaas, Paas, and Saas have become fundamental to IT, and container technology has also become the hot topic of every IT recruiting industry. According to the research firm Gartner, the latest figures suggest that the IaaS market will be worth a total of $64.3 billion in 2021, up from $50.4 billion in 2020.

AWS dominates the market since its first launch in the year 2006. With its first cloud products, Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), by 2015 it brought in nearly $8 billion a year.

After more than a decade, AWS still has its dominance with a revenue of $13.5 billion for Q1 2021, which exceeded analyst predictions of $13.1 billion. This quarter, AWS's revenue accounted for 12% of Amazon's total revenue. In addition, AWS is the clear market leader globally for public IaaS and PaaS market share at 33 per cent, followed by Microsoft at 16 per cent, and Google at 8 per cent.

The surge in Public Cloud Spend

Pandemic drove most businesses to operate from the safe houses, and this gave rise to the surge in cloud spending of the organizations. With a wide range of Cloud service providers AWS, Azure, and GCP stay the most demanded ones.

Global tenant spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow to $332 billion in 2021 at a yearly growth of 23.1%, according to the latest figures from Gartner. Software as a service (SaaS) continues to be the largest bucket, representing almost 37% of total spending in 2021. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) represents almost a quarter, with the platform as a service (PaaS) at 17.9%.

1. Amazon Web Services

Ahead of the pack, Amazon cloud service is the leading cloud service provider with 32% of the market share. There are various reasons for AWS to stay ahead of all other providers; one of them is being free for end users for a year.

AWS Free Tier, which lets users get hands-on experience with the AWS cloud platform before committing to full cloud migration, and at no cost to them, makes AWS stay ahead in the game. For 12 months, users have access to AWS Free Tier services such as Amazon EC2 (cloud computing capacity), Amazon S3 (cloud storage), and Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service).

2. Microsoft Azure

Azure is the second-largest IaaS and PaaS service provider trailing behind Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is trendy among large, geographically dispersed enterprises, especially Microsoft software like Windows and Office.

In a rush to catch up with AWS, Microsoft launched Azure around 2008 with its Simple Storage Service. Competing closely with AWS, Google Cloud, and IBM, Microsoft Azure is one of the unquestioned cloud leaders and is mainly used among the DevOps community as it offers the best DevOps service (Azure DevOps Server).

3. Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Having a 7% Market share, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) grew around the initial Google App Engine, which was used for hosting web applications from Google's data centers. Since the launch of the Google App Engine in 2008, GCP has grown into one of the foremost cloud computing platforms on the market.

Defending the number three spot behind AWS and Azure. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has a vast Iaas offering and services with a deep technical strength from its dominance in the search engine market. GCP's greatest strength would be data analytics and its popular service GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine).

Conclusion

If we say that AWS is the best, then probably we are just looking into the company's market share. But only based on that, we can't rank any cloud service providers. Every cloud service provider has its own use, and every provider has its own unique flavors. For example, we can't say that Amazon EKS is the best as it belongs to AWS. Doing that would make us anti-GKE. In my opinion, GKE is far better than EKS.

But if we have to list the top cloud service provider, then it would certainly be AWS, with its vast range of services.