Introduction

Introduction

If you or your business is keeping up-to-date with the current trends in the tech market, then you will have heard the phrase “cloud computing” before. What exactly is it though? Who are the big players currently in the game? Most importantly, what are the benefits of using these services opposed to your own?




Cloud services can be defined as a services that are offered to users on command directly from the internet from a cloud computing provider’s servers instead of being provided by the companies own on-site equipment. The users hand off the more strenuous business activities to these third party companies. These services are designed to be scalable to accommodate the users varying needs. Scalability is crucial for all business no matter the size in order to maintain and keep up-to-date business models. Cloud Services can have many features and functions across all providers. Common features include things such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Recovery as a Service (RaaS).




During the 1960s, the initial concepts of time-sharing became popularized via RJE (Remote Job Entry); this terminology was mostly associated with large vendors such as IBM and DEC. Full-time-sharing solutions were available by the early 1970s on such platforms as Multics (on GE hardware), Cambridge CTSS, and the earliest UNIX ports (on DEC hardware) (Wikipedia). In the 2000s “Cloud computing” came into existence. In April 2008, Amazon released its Elastic Compute Cloud as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and this started the trend of “Cloud Computing” as its known today.




Many companies today offer these types of services to users. However there are three major players currently dominating the market. These big three are AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud in that order. The competition for leadership in the public cloud computing is fierce three-way race: AWS vs. Azure vs. Google (Patrizio). The best way to distinguish these three from one another are by examining the history, pros and cons, and demand for each.

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