Amazon, Google, and Microsoft dominate the cloud

As of the time this post is written, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are by far the biggest providers of cloud services on the planet. They control significant portions of the cloud market, especially the North American cloud market. They each have huge cloud platforms with multiple geographic regions. They all also support a wide variety of cloud technologies currently in use.

Amazon is the biggest provider overall

Amazon currently enjoys the largest share of the cloud market thanks to the advantages they enjoy from pioneering the cloud for the mass market. Amazon was one of the first really large cloud providers to start marketing and selling cloud services to users based on the platform they operated to power Amazon.com, Amazon’s main e-commerce website. They built a platform capable of efficiently and flexibly running Amazon.com, and they decided to share that platform with outside parties under their Amazon Web Services brand. In fact, Amazon’s cloud division has historically been one of their most profitable divisions.

Amazon’s advantage is so significant, in fact, that their share of the cloud services market is much larger than Google’s and Microsoft’s, despite the advances Google and Microsoft have made in catching up to Amazon.

Other providers are growing

There are other providers in the cloud market. IBM and Oracle operate their own cloud platforms, for example, and try to compete against Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. There are also other providers who are not major enterprises who provide cloud services like Digital Ocean or OVH. Many of these smaller cloud providers focus on smaller niches than the big enterprise clouds, and they differentiate their services by focusing on supporting specific use cases or workloads.

International providers are growing, too!

While Amazon, Google, and Microsoft enjoy significant market share today, several international companies and efforts aim to replicate their scale and success in their own local markets. Alibaba in China, for example, has rapidly grown their cloud platform. In Europe, the several technology companies and European governments are trying to create a massive cloud under the GAIA-X initiative.