Top 10 Cloud Service Providers In 2021

Introduction

Whether its infrastructure, software, applications, services, products, or even an operating system, everything is making its way to the cloud. As a result, billions of dollars are being invested in cloud migration. In this detailed article, Ill review the most popular cloud providers, their cloud offerings, and which cloud provider you should choose for your cloud services, from a developer perspective.

Cloud computing has multiplied over the past several years. As such businesses are increasingly transitioning to different cloud services. In this article, Ill review some of the best, most popular cloud providers and their offerings, pricing, and features. I will also provide details on which cloud provider you should choose and why.

Cloud computing is Web-based computing thatallows businesses and individuals to consume computing resources such as virtual machines, databases, processing, memory, services, storage, messaging, events, and pay-as-you-go. Cloud services often improve upon older ones. For example, the pay-as-you-go model charges for resources as they are used. Unlike traditional computing, if you do not use any resources, you do not need to pay. Similar to a water connection or an electricity line, you have a meter and this meter keeps track of your monthly usage. You then pay for that usage at a given rate.

Here are some key advantages of cloud computing:

1. Cloud computing allows a business to cut their operational and fixed monthly costs of hardware, databases, servers, software licenses. Eventually, it will reduce the need for IT resources, including people. All hardware, database servers, web servers, software, products, and services are hosted in the cloud and added to an account as needed.

2. Cloud computing offers 24/7 uptime (99.99% uptime). Cloud servers and data centers are managed by the cloud service provided. Therefore, there is no need for employee management.

3. Cloud computing is scalable and reliable. There is no limit to the number of users or resources. Furthermore, the cloud increases processing and resources as needed. If you do not need resources, you can always scale down.

4. Cloud computing provides maintainability and automatic updates of new software, OS, databases, and third-party software. It also reduces IT labor cost for a business.

5. Cloud service providers have data centers in various locations, which makes them faster and more reliable. Larger companies such as Microsoft and AWS even have data centers around the world.

Cloud computing can be divided into three major categories, Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

IaaS offers entire IT computing infrastructure, provisioned and managed over the internet. The key components of IaaS are used to replace existing development and test environments, virtual machines, website hosting, storage, backup, networking, servers, operating systems, middleware, data, and applications, and high-performance computing (HPC).

According to Gartner Magic Quadrant, AWS leads Microsoft and Google cloud in the IaaS position.

The PaaS component of cloud computing offers a full development and deployment environment in the cloud, including dev, test, QA, debugging, and deployment tools and services.

SaaS is a software developed and hosted by someone else. Businesses or individuals are able to use them as needed.

Today, the majority of top cloud service providers offer all of these services. The two leaders in cloud computing are Amazon and Microsoft, followed by Google, Alibaba, and IBM. In this article, we will compare the top cloud computing providers and their categories.

According to a report by Canalys shown in the below chart, in Q4, 2020, AWS cloud grew by 28% and Azure, Google, and Alibaba clouds grew 50%, 58%, and 54% respectively. As of this report, AWS has 31% of total cloud market share followed by Azure, Google, and Alibaba that have 20%, 7%, and 6% respectively.

Here is a list of my top 10 cloud service providers:

The following table summarizes the top 3 key players and their offerings in the cloud computing world:

AWS

Azure

Google Cloud

Company

AWS Inc.

Microsoft

Google

Launch year

2006

2010

2008

Geographical Regions

25

54

21

Availability Zones

78

140 (countries)

61

Key offerings

Compute, storage, database, analytics, networking, machine learning, and AI, mobile, developer tools, IoT, security, enterprise applications, blockchain.

Compute, storage, mobile, data management, messaging, media services, CDN, machine learning and AI, developer tools, security, blockchain, functions, IoT.

Compute, storage, databases, networking, big data, cloud AI, management tools, Identity and security, IoT, API platform

Compliance Certificates

46

90

Annual Revenue

$33 billion

$35 billion

$8 billion

#1. Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an Amazon company that was launched in the year 2002. AWS is the most popular cloud service provider in the world.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the worlds most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 165 fully-featured services from data centers globally. This service is used by millions of customers.

AWSs revenue in the year 2018 was $25.6 billion with a profit of $7.2 billion. The revenue is expected to grow to $33 billion in 2019.

AWS Services

AWS offers hundreds of services. Some of these include Virtual Private Cloud, EC2, AWS Data Transfer, Simple Storage Service, DynamoDB, Elastic Compute Cloud, AWS Key Management Service, AmazonCloudWatch, Simple Notification Service, Relational Database Service, Route 53, Simple Queue Service, CloudTrail, and Simple Email Service.

The following graphic is a list of the various categories of services available in AWS. The right side of the list includes AWSs featured services.

AWS Security

Cloud security is the highest priority for AWS. As a customer, you will benefit from a data center and network architecture built to meet the requirements of the most security-sensitive organizations.

AWS security offers services such as infrastructure security, DDoS mitigation, data encryption, inventory and configuration, monitoring and logging, identity and access control, and penetration testing.

Compliances

AWS provides 40+ compliance certifications for the global, US, and other countries. Here is the list of various supported compliance certifications:

AWS global availability

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Top 10 Cloud Service Providers In 2021