Cloud computing has taken the market by storm and for good reasons too. Companies now don’t have to waste money and time buying and maintaining their own servers and instead can directly use the ready-made professional infrastructure provided by cloud service providers. While there are many companies fighting to gain dominance in the public and enterprise cloud sector, three companies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) hold the commanding position both for Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS). Brief Description about AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform

Chapter 1: About

A. AWS Strengths: AWS has been the leader in cloud IaaS based on market share for the past decade. Thus market dominance is its biggest strength. The reason for this huge popularity is due to its massive scope of operations. With an extensive and mature catalogue of available services and a huge comprehensive network of data centers worldwide, it has become the favorite for enterprise users due to its capabilities for governing a large number of users and resources. Weakness: The biggest weakness of Amazon is its cost structure which not only is difficult to understand but difficult to manage too when dealing with huge chunks of data. Also the number of services available can be overwhelming to some customers who then become skeptical of it. B. Microsoft Azure Strengths: Microsoft wasn’t an early player in the cloud computing sector but it did a lot of things correctly to establish itself as a dominant player. By repurposing it’s on premises software already a standard in the industry like Windows Server, Office, SQl Server, Sharepoint, Dynamics Active Directory, .NET etc. it gave itself a big jumpstart. The integration of Azure with industry standard tools also by Microsoft meant that enterprise users naturally opted for Azure as their platform of choice to keep things familiar and under one ecosystem. Special discounts and offers for existing enterprise users also attracted many customers. Weakness: Though Azure is an enterprise ready platform, Gartner Client reported that its service felt less enterprise ready than their expectations. Issues with technical support, improper documentation, training and breadth of the ISV partner ecosystem leaves room for much more improvement. C. Google Cloud Platform Strengths: The name itself says much for Google Cloud Platform. It is designed for the cloud native businesses. Not only it specializes in high compute offerings like Big Data, Analytics and machine learning, it also offers considerable scale and load balancing. Google knows how data centers work and how to increase the response time. Businesses which compete with the eCommerce giant Amazon tend to prefer google as it is more open source centric and Dev-Ops centric. An interesting fact to note here is that the kubernetes standard that AWS and Azure use was developed by Google. Weakness: Google was fairly late in the market when AWS and Azure were already dominating. Compared to AWS and Azure it doesn’t provide that many services and also doesn’t have as many data centers like its competitors. It is often chosen by businesses as a secondary provider rather than a strategic provider.