Cloud is the new technology that most of the businesses are turning towards in order to get the best services at the optimum rates. According to IDC, public cloud computing market is expected to double up soon. It will increase from $ 70 billion in 2015 to $ 140 billion in the year 2019. Using cloud is easy because it has many benefits that a traditional system does not have. Let us look at what cloud is and then what are its advantages. In the end we look at the top cloud service providers that are currently leading the world market.
What is the cloud?
Cloud is the platform where you can set up your application. It is a shared platform where the resources such as storage space, computational engines, hosting services are all available on the cloud. The users can just concentrate on developing their applications. Once the application is created it is deployed on the cloud, where the complete infrastructure has already been set up to support the functioning of the application. In this way the maintenance and working of the application becomes very easy.
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The benefits of the cloud platform that top cloud service providers must have
- Firstly there is the benefit of unlimited scalability. The cloud service providers has a huge amount of (you can say unlimited for practical purposes) space available. Once your demand suddenly increases you can easily amend your payment plan and get more space. As the space was already there and you just needed to get access to it, there is no time lost in getting the hardware set up. In the fields with competitors, this can give you massive advantages.
- Secondly, there is a major benefit of cost that you get with the cloud. Almost all the cloud service providers give you the option of pay as you go. Hence you do not need to waste your resources. When the demand is high pay more and get more resources, when there is little demand no need to pay for idle resources. Release the resources and save your money.
- Thirdly, there are resources available. You can get huge computational engines and hardware available. You can rent these out from the cloud according to your need. If you wanted to set up your own system it would take a lot of time as well as money. But on the cloud you can use the resources and pay an optimum cost.
- Storage space is also a big advantage of the cloud systems. There is a lot of storage space available on the cloud. You can take the amount of space that you require and the scale up according to your needs.
- Robust and reliable system is another major benefit of the cloud. The system is fault tolerant in many ways. There are many instances of the data stored in various locations. So even when a system will fail, the backup system will have the data stored in it.
- Machine learning and Artificial intelligence data can easily be incorporated by your applications using the cloud platform.
- Cloud platform is the best place to work for big data. The power and speed required to process the real time big data is only through the cloud platform.
- Security is another factor of the cloud platform. When your application hosted on a cloud faces the attack, it is the attack on the cloud platform itself. If it is a popular cloud platform like Google or Amazon, their infrastructure is robust and better protected to face attacks than the normal cloud platform.
These are some of the top benefits of the cloud platform. Based on these benefits we see that recently a number of people are shifting from the other platforms to embrace the cloud platform and avail all these benefits.
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Top Cloud Service Providers
These are some of the top cloud service providers.
- Amazon Web Services
- Google Cloud Platform
- Microsoft Azure
- IBM Cloud services
- 1&1
There are many other cloud service providers too, out of which some are based on these top service providers and use their resources that they are then distributing to their clients. Now let us look the popular cloud service providers and what are the requirements to work with them.
Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services or AWS as it is popularly known as, is the most popular service provider and ranked first in the top cloud service providers. It is the oldest cloud service platform and a subsidiary of Amazon.com. It began in the year 2002, in order to provide various services to the users but it flopped because at that time people could not understand the amount of scalability, computational power and the storage space that would be required by the users. However Amazon workers knew that ultimately this technology would be the next big thing so they relaunched a much better and simpler version in 2006. Initially there were three main services provided by the amazon cloud platform, S3 cloud services, SqS and EC2. Now there are more than 70 services that are offered by the amazon wen services.
They have a large list of products in the fields of computation, storage, networking, content delivery, data storage, application deployment, management and services. The customers of Amazon web services include more than a million active customers every month in 190 countries, including nearly 2,000 government agencies, 5,000 education institutions and more than 17,500 nonprofits. Notable customers of Amazon web services include big names like Netflix, NASA, Kempinski Hotels and Reddit.
It has data centers all around the globe helping the users to work efficiently without the loss of data and other services. There are a number of user friendly subscriber plans that would help the users to pay the minimum for the services that they consumer. There are easy options for scalability and upgrades hence if you want to start from a low level, it is ok and whenever you see a surge in the traffic you can easily switch plans and reach the next level.
Amazon web services is the biggest market player in the field of cloud services. However it faces tough competition from big industry competitors like Google and IBM that are also in our list of top cloud service providers.
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Google cloud service platform
Google is a market leader in most of the IT related services but Google cloud platform still has competitors who are above it in the market share. However, it is fast increasing its services and thus the user base is also increasing with it. One big motivation for the people to join the Google cloud platform is that it is based on the same infrastructure as Google. As we all know Google has a very strong and robust infrastructure so Google cloud platform will provide the applications deployed on it with a secure and robust infrastructure.
In the beginning you can test the Google Cloud services through the free trails program. You can open a Google Cloud account very easily. It has just two requirements.
- A Google account
- A credit card number
Do not worry about the credit card number. You will not be charged through it at the beginning. In fact in the free trial you would have a 300 dollars balance added to your account for free that you can utilize for the next one year. So the services that are available for free trial period will not cost you anything within a 300 dollar limit. When the free trial period is over the account will be suspended and you will be notified about the account suspension. After that it is up to you to decide whether you want to continue with it or not. Thus you need not to worry that as the free trial is over you will be charged more.
There are facilities that you get with Google cloud like sustained use discounts, pre-emptible VM instances, per minute billing, coldline and stom machine types. Because of all these detailed pricing packages and facilities more and more people are joining the Google Cloud platform.
Another benefit of GCP is the security. On the Google cloud the data is encrypted when it is at rest and it is encrypted when it is moving. There is no additional cost or time required for it. This is the way the cloud works.
There are some big names that are customers of the Google cloud platform. It includes Cocoa Cola, Khan academy, Atomic fiction and pocket Gems.
With GCP you can crunch terabytes of data within minutes. It is a detailed platform where you can find all your required services at a good rate. The computational power of Google cloud is very high and it is a great place to work with big data in an efficient way in real time. Many of the projects based on big data are preferring Google cloud platform over Amazon because of computational power.
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Microsoft Azure
It is the last of the BIG 3 in the field of cloud computing. Microsoft Azure is the cloud service provider that is managed by the big name Microsoft. It is also a detailed cloud service provider. It provides all the three services of IaaS, Saas and PaaS depending upon your requirement. By nearly all estimates, Azure is the second largest IaaS and PaaS service on the planet, trailing behind Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is particularly popular among large, geographically dispersed enterprises, especially those that use Microsoft software like Windows and Office.
Today, Microsoft Azure enjoys a reputation as a mature, reliable and highly secure public cloud provider. However, Azure has had to play a lot of catch up to earn this spot. During the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2008, two years after Amazon Web Services (AWS) had gone live with its Simple Storage Service, Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, announced that the company planned to launch its own cloud computing service called Windows Azure. The plan called for Microsoft to offer five key categories of cloud services:
Windows Azure for compute
storage and networking
Microsoft SQL Services for databases
Microsoft .NET Services for developers
Live Services for file sharing
Microsoft SharePoint Services
and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services SaaS offerings.
There is a close competition among Amzon web services and MS Azure with Google a close follower. These are the top 3 cloud service providers. There are a number of others too, but there is no competition of the smaller cloud service providers with these big 3.
IBM Cloud
IBM cloud is also the cloud service that is fast becoming popular with the masses. It also gives good price packages and great services. According to some reports IBM even has a bigger IaaS and PaaS services share in the market as compared to Google. It has an overall rate of $6.9 billion in the market.
IBM’s most visible cloud service is its Bluemix PaaS, which is aimed primarily at enterprise development teams. The company also a lot of enterprise software on a SaaS basis, and it sells cloud infrastructure, cloud management tools and cloud managed services. The company first dove into modern cloud computing in 2008, when it announced a software as a service collaboration suite codenamed Bluehouse. That suite became LotusLive, which launched in early 2009 and later was renamed IBM SmartCloud for Social Business. IBM’s cloud efforts took a major step forward in 2013, when it acquired SoftLayer, which was then the world’s largest privately held cloud computing infrastructure provider. IBM continued running SoftLayer as a separate service, but also begin integrating SoftLayer technology into its cloud hardware, software, and services. At the same time, IBM also set up a Cloud Services division within the company.
1&1 Cloud server
The 1&1 Cloud Server uses the latest virtualization technology and next-generation architecture to store, access and share data.
Because resources are available virtually, users can benefit from ultimate flexibility, with the ability to change their server configuration at any time. This allows companies to dynamically manage hardware and software to align them with the scope and requirements of IT projects.
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The 1&1 Cloud Server also offers enhanced security and availability, with hardware components automatically taking over in the event of another one failing. That is why we have included it in top cloud service providers list.
Here is a tabular comparison of top cloud service providers.
These are the top cloud service providers in the world. Which of the top cloud service providers do you use? Which do you think is the beast among the top cloud service providers. Let us know by commenting below.
