Cloud computing — a process of storing and accessing data and computing services over the internet — is one of the biggest revolutions in the history of the internet. It allows computing services (including servers, storage, databases, networks, software, analytics, and intelligence) to be delivered through the internet wherever and whenever they are needed. Globally, enterprises are swiftly adopting cloud computing services, especially after the Covid-19 pandemic, to reduce costs, mitigate risks, and achieve higher scalability. For example, Amazon’s sales of its cloud platform Amazon Web Services recorded a year-on-year growth of 37% to reach $62.2B in 2021, compared with 30% in 2020.
Although cloud computing provides significant benefits in the form of reduced hardware and maintenance costs, flexibility, and greater global reach and scalability, privacy and security continue to be key drawbacks deterring its wider adoption. Therefore, to overcome these key concerns, enterprises are considering integrating cloud computing with blockchain, which is popular for attributes such as security, decentralization, and transparency.
In this article, we’ll look at the cloud services that are offered by Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, and we will examine how these companies are delving into Web3/blockchain development through their cloud services.
Major tech giants and their cloud service offerings
While there are several cloud service providers globally, in this article, we focus on these three major tech giants, as they collectively account for most of the global cloud computing market. According to US-based Synergy Research Group, together, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft accounted for 65% of the global cloud infrastructure market (outside China) in Q1’22. Amazon accounted for one-third of the total market share followed by Microsoft (22%) and Google (10%).
Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud services platform offered by Amazon.com. AWS is the global leader in the cloud computing business, offering a variety of services, including computing, storage, and databases for emerging technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence. It caters to the needs of startups, large enterprises, and leading government agencies.
AWS started as an internal cloud offering but has emerged as a publicly available cloud platform that is highly reliable, scalable, and low-cost, fueling businesses in 190 countries globally. Some of its key cloud services include Amazon EC2, Amazon Simple Storage Service, Amazon Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon RDS, AWS Lambda, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, Amazon Lightsail, and Amazon SageMaker.
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure, formerly known as Windows Azure, is the second-largest cloud platform after AWS, used by over 95% of Fortune 500 companies. It provides a wide array of solutions tailored to different industries, including retail, financial services, gaming, manufacturing, healthcare, and media and entertainment.
It offers cloud services in four different forms, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS), and serverless. Some of its popular products are Azure SQL, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure DevOps, Azure Backup, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure Cognitive Services, Azure Arc, Azure Quantum, Azure Functions, App Service, Azure Virtual Desktop, and Virtual Machines.
The adoption of Microsoft Azure is increasing because it is becoming the preferred choice for organizations that already use Microsoft products. By offering tailored solutions, Microsoft-centric enterprises are able to switch to a cloud or hybrid-cloud environment very smoothly. In addition, companies with a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement are also offered discounts on licensing for Azure. Apart from Windows-based services, Azure also supports open-source languages, technologies, and platforms.
The Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is Google’s cloud offering. Initially launched to support its own services, such as Google Search and YouTube, it was later expanded to offer enterprise services. At present, the platform offers over 150 services, spanning computing, networking, storage, and data analytics among others.
While GCP is the smallest of the three, it is growing at a rapid pace by providing robust integrations with open-source projects and third-party services. Some of its featured products are Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, Cloud SDK, Cloud SQL, Google Kubernetes Engine, BigQuery, Cloud CDN, Dataflow, Operations, Cloud Run, and Anthos.
The following table highlights the key differences between these three cloud service providers.
Blockchain/Web3-based offerings from Amazon, Microsoft, and Google
Let us look at what these companies are doing in this space.
Amazon: AWS announced the general availability of its Amazon Managed Blockchain (AMB) service in April 2019. The service makes it easy to join public blockchain networks or create and manage scalable private blockchain networks using open-source frameworks. While the service initially supported the Hyperledger Fabric framework, it later launched Ethereum support in March 2021.
