Re: Confused
As the story notes, this study is on "Infrastructure as a Service" (IaaS), not "Platform as a Service". Google placed their bets on PaaS very early, and got into IaaS much later. The absence of other major cloud vendors from the study is due to them not being in the IaaS side of the market at all.
Microsoft's cloud is more focused on IaaS because they have a lot of customers who want to move legacy applications to "the cloud" so they can shut down data centres and bin staff as a cost saving (theoretically, anyway). Microsoft's efforts at PaaS on the other hand have supposedly not gone as well.
Google doesn't have that legacy system base, as they started off as a cloudy type company right from the beginning. Thus, they're focused on applications that were designed from the ground up for "the cloud", and their PaaS is oriented around this.
So it goes like this:
Amazon - By far the biggest, cheap, lots of third parties based on it.
Microsoft - Move your legacy applications to "the cloud".
Google - Mainly PaaS.
Salesforce, etc. - Entirely PaaS.
OpenStack vendors - Like Amazon, but with less vendor lock-in.
Theoretically, PaaS applications should take less effort to create, be more scalable, and require fewer resources to run and so should be cheaper to operate in the long run. On the other hand, if the PaaS is proprietary, then there's more vendor lock-in. Decisions, decisions.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
