Major Cloud Providers

A handful of major providers dominate the public cloud market, each offering a broadly similar set of core services under different names and with different strengths.

The Big Three

While dozens of cloud providers exist, three companies have historically held the largest share of the public cloud market, each with a distinct set of strengths.

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) — the largest and most mature provider, with the broadest range of services.
• Microsoft Azure — strong integration with Microsoft's existing enterprise ecosystem (Windows Server, Active Directory, Office 365).
• Google Cloud Platform (GCP) — known for strengths in data analytics, machine learning, and Kubernetes (which Google originally created).

Core Services Map Across Providers

Most core service categories exist across all major providers under different product names — a virtual machine service, an object storage service, a managed database, and so on — which means core cloud computing concepts transfer between providers even though specific product names don't.

Common Mistakes

• Assuming skills learned on one provider don't transfer to another — the underlying concepts (compute, storage, networking) are broadly consistent across all major providers.
• Choosing a provider based purely on brand recognition without evaluating pricing, service availability in your target region, or existing organisational relationships.
• Assuming all providers are functionally identical — each has genuine areas of relative strength and different pricing structures worth researching for your specific use case.
• Underestimating the effort involved in switching providers later, due to differences in proprietary services and tooling.