Comparative Clouds

With the cloud industry still in its infancy, it is imperative to complete a thorough analysis of the major competitors in this market. The research covered in this paper provides a comparative analysis of the main competitors in the cloud industry: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. The focus of this analysis will be structured around usability, performance and cost. While the other competitors have their niche markets, the best overall cloud provider was Amazon WebServices. Introduction From the inception of the cloud computing industry multiple companies have come forth to supply the growing demand. The earliest suppliers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), were able to take advantage of the industry while there were few competitors. This made it difficult for later providers such asGoogle Cloud (GC) and Microsoft Azure as they attempted to provide offerings that could compete against the set industry standard. With the growing number of companiestha tareenteringthisindustry,forcompanies and individuals that use the cloud it is important that they evaluate the current industry offerings. By doing so, they can determine which cloud services will best match theirneeds. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the three most popular clouds, AWS, GC, and Azure, against three metrics to determine which is the bestoverall cloud service provider in the cloud computing industry. For the scope of this paper, the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) segment of the cloud computingindustry will be the focus. The first metric evaluated is usability whi chwillcovertheprovider’savailablecloudservices, its number of data centers, and customer reviews on their strengths and weaknesses. The second metric is performance which will include an analysis of both hardware and software offerings that are available by the different IaaS providers. The last metric is a cost analysis which will evaluate the costs for various servicesavailablethroughtheIaaSproviders. In the section to follow, we will provide a brief analysis of the current Cloud IaaS market. The three sections after that will cover the usability,performance, and then cost analysis for the three cloudproviders we are analyzing. Finally, we will determine the best overall cloud provider based on the analysis from the previoussections. Market Research The recent emergence of the cloud industry has had a dramatic impact on the strategies of many businesses as they switch from using data centers to storing and managing their information on the cloud. In 2017, the marketvalueofthecloudcomputingindustrywaslisted at over $18.5 billion after growing by 37.5% from 2016 and similar growth is expected in the years to come [1]. This industry is split into three segments: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). This paper focuses on IaaS which accounts for 24.3% of the market value which equates to $4 billion [2]. While there are numerous cloud providers in this industry, the market is mostly dominated by AWS (41.5%market share) and Azure (29.4% market share) [2]. Each of the other competitors, including GC, hold 3% of themarket or less, but all theses small competitors combined account for for 29.2% of the market which is a sizable chunk. The breakdown of IaaS market share can be seen in figure1. 157 Tecnología en Marcha, Vol. 33, especial Movilidad estudiantil. Octubre, 2020