It’s time for our quarterly AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud market share comparison, including the latest earnings the ‘big three’ cloud providers have reported. Let’s take a look at all three providers side-by-side to see where they stand.
Note: several previous versions of this article have been published. It has been updated for May 2021.
AWS vs. Azure vs. Google Cloud Earnings
To level-set this comparison, first know that – unsurprisingly – the cloud market as a whole is bigger than ever. Gartner has predicted worldwide public cloud spend to grow 18% in 2021, with 70% of organizations using cloud to increase cloud spending in the wake of COVID-19.
So within that market, let’s take a look at the AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud market share breakdown and what each cloud provider’s reports shared.
AWS
Amazon reported Amazon Web Services (AWS) revenue of $13.5 billion for Q1 2021 – which exceeded analyst predictions of $13.1 billion. This is compared to $10.33 billion for Q1 2020. AWS revenue grew 32% in the quarter, accelerating from 28% growth in the fourth quarter. This quarter, AWS’s revenue accounted for 12% of Amazon’s total revenue – and nearly 47% of Amazon’s overall operating income. AWS continues to bolster the company as a whole with its profitability.
This quarter, AWS announced that former AWS executive and current head of Salesforce Tableau Adam Selipsky will run AWS, replacing Andy Jassy as he moves up to head all of Amazon.
Amazon’s CFO, Brian Olsavsky, said on the earnings call with investors, “During COVID, we’ve seen many enterprises decide that they no longer want to manage their own technology infrastructure,” he said. “They see that partnering with AWS and moving to the cloud gives them better cost, better capability and better speed of innovation. We expect this trend to continue as we move into the post pandemic recovery. There’s significant momentum around the world, including broad and deep engagement across major industries.”
And of course, much of the growth in public cloud comes from net-new workloads, not just those migrated from on-premises infrastructure. We’re curious to see how this trend continues.
Azure
While Amazon specifies AWS revenue, Microsoft only reports on Azure’s growth rate. That number is 50% revenue growth over the previous quarter – which is faster than the 46% growth analysts expected. This time last year, growth was reported at 59%. You may see headlines touting that “Azure growth rates are slowing”, comparing those revenue growth percentages. However, the metric is of questionable value as Azure continues to increase revenue at this enormous scale.
Here are the revenue numbers Microsoft does report. Azure is under the “Intelligent Cloud” business, which grew 23% to $15.1 billion. The operating group also includes server products and cloud services (26% growth).
Microsoft sees its cloud growth as fundamental to its success. CEO Satya Nadella said, “Over a year into the pandemic, digital adoption curves aren’t slowing down. They’re accelerating, and it’s just the beginning. We are building the cloud for the next decade, expanding our addressable market and innovating across every layer of the tech stack to help our customers be resilient and transform.”
The lack of specificity around Azure frustrates many pundits as it simply can’t be compared directly to AWS, and inevitably raises eyebrows about how Azure is really doing. Of course, it also assumes that IaaS is the only piece of “cloud” that’s important, but then, that’s how AWS has grown to dominate the market.
Nonetheless, Microsoft’s cloud business is clearly generating success for the company. Intelligent Cloud delivered the highest operating income of all segments this quarter at $6.4 billion, which is 37.7% of total consolidated operating income.
Google Cloud
This quarter, Google Cloud reported revenue of $4.047 billion, an increase of 46% year-over-year. Operating losses were $974 million, compared to losses of $1.73 billion one year previously.
Note that the Google Cloud unit includes not only Google Cloud Platform but also Google Workspace (formerly G Suite).
Like the other giants, Alphabet highlighted its cloud growth. Google and Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat said, “We’re very pleased with the ongoing momentum in Google Cloud, with revenues of $4.0 billion in the quarter reflecting strength and opportunity in both GCP and Workspace.”
Porat also said that Google Cloud Platform (GCP)’s revenue growth was once again “meaningfully above cloud overall.”
Alibaba Cloud
Alibaba cloud revenue grew 37% year-over-year to $2.6 billion. They mention that “the slower revenue growth during the quarter was primarily due to revenue decline from a top cloud customer in the Internet industry. This customer, which has a sizeable presence outside of China that used our overseas cloud services in the past, has decided to terminate the relationship with respect to their international business due to non-product related requirements.” They believe their remaining cloud customers are sufficiently diversified to prevent such a large impact from a single customer in the future.
Cloud Computing Market Share Breakdown – AWS vs. Azure vs. Google Cloud
When we originally published this blog in 2018, we included a market share breakdown from analyst Canalys, which reported AWS in the lead owning about a third of the market, Microsoft in second with about 15 percent, and Google sitting around 5 percent.
In 2019, they reported an overall growth in the cloud infrastructure market of 42%. By provider, AWS had the biggest sales gain with a $2.3 billion YOY increase, but Canalys reported Azure and Google Cloud with bigger percentage increases.
As of April 2021, Canalys reports that the worldwide cloud market grew 35% this quarter to $41.8 billion. AWS has 32% of the market, followed by Azure at 19%, Google at 7%, Alibaba Cloud close behind. 
Bezos has said, “AWS had the unusual advantage of a seven-year head start before facing like-minded competition. As a result, the AWS services are by far the most evolved and most functionality-rich.”
Our anecdotal experience talking to cloud customers often finds that true. It seems clear that in the case of AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud market share – AWS still has a substantial lead, and their market share remains steady. With that said, all players are pushing growth and innovation and driving public cloud adoption across the board.
Microsoft Teams
Google Hangouts
Slack
Amazon EC2
Amazon Auto Scaling Groups
Azure Virtual Machine
Azure Scale Sets
Azure Resource Groups
Google Compute Engine
Google Managed Instance Groups
Alibaba Cloud
EBS Volumes
EBS Snapshots
Azure Volumes
Amazon RDS
Amazon Neptune
Amazon Redshift
Amazon Aurora
Google Cloud SQL
Amazon EKS
AKS
GKE
Microsoft ADFS
OneLogin
Ping Identity
Microsoft Active Directory
Google G Suite
Okta
Centrify
Rest API
JSON Webhook
BMC
ServiceNow
SolarWinds
Ansible
AWS CloudFormation
Azure DevOps
Terraform
Bamboo
Spinnaker
Jenkins
DataDog
Microsoft SCOM
NewRelic
Splunk
Zabbix
Very insightful article. I am working on a similar product (MVP: https://clunite.com) that compares the three cloud providers, head to head. I would love to hear your thoughts on it as the product is in MVP state.
I’m sure Microsoft doesn’t want to spend much time arguing who is bigger, but Microsoft cloud IS bigger than Amazon, and comparing AWS to Azure misses the reason why. What that approach actually does is attempt to say “AWS doesn’t play in certain areas, so we’re only going to compare what AWS does and define the market as being what AWS does.” What is missed is this:
When a company decides they are moving some, or all of their infrastructure so that they no longer have to support it, they have several categories of applications they must consider. Let’s take just the file servers and email servers as an example. One choice they can make is to move this to VMs in AWS. If they choose to do this, then AWS gets credited with market growth. If, however, they decide that Office 365 provides what they need as a SaaS solution, they move there, Microsoft picks up the cloud workload, but it doesn’t show up in a comparison of AWS vs. Azure. The same thing happens with CRM software which can be moved onto AWS, or onto Office Dynamics. These are major parts of most companies’ total IT footprint, though.
When you look at it like this, you realize that Microsoft Cloud is bigger, and the gap is widening. In that case, Microsoft is, in fact, the largest cloud provider and is pulling away from the competition. It’s completely missing what is happening with the market to try to compare AWS with Azure.
This doesn’t mean there is no place for AWS, and it’s not bad-talking AWS. It’s just pointing out what is being missed in these articles.
So long as it is up front, I see no issue only comparing what AWS does as “the market”. Heck, you got to draw the line somewhere in comparison, else you could expand it to include sales of any kind where you have Amazon selling a ton of stuff to businesses or even individuals.
I personally was expecting a view of how big based on physical characteristics and not maturity or completeness. In that case I still only got a partial answer myself.
Azure is a joke. Most of their revenue comes from Office 365. We use both Azure and AWS and I can tell you that AWS is 10x better than Azure. In the past 6 months, we’ve had two outages where we couldn’t even login to Azure.
Thanks for weighing in Enzo – the cloud revenue is definitely obscured by Office 365.
What exactly makes AWS 10x better? (I feel the opposite but I’ve been using Azure since its inception and am heavily biased).
This is the most insightful comment to date on this subject, and a point missed by many.
Ultimately, business leaders make the decision on where they spend money. Given a choice between managing infrastructure themselves or getting continuous updates en masse via IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, a CIO will often choose the latter.
Keep in mind also that, when analyzing the above decision, a reasonable CIO is also looking at other options, like OpenOffice, Google G Suite, Salesforce, ServiceNow, etc. The fact that Microsoft has retained customers (and picked up new customers) speaks volumes to their value.
Interesting view point, but since Microsoft cloud services run on Azure, there is most likely some sort of cross charge model in play that would would be reflected in the revenue numbers for Azure.
Not sure how this would affect the market share numbers though
Amazon is a Microsoft partner either way Microsoft win.
So, Amazon is way ahead it’s competitors. Well it deserves to be there as well. Although, it has to remove all the glitches that the customers are facing in order to retain that spot. I have been using AWS Cloud hosting through a third party platform like Cloudways to reduce the sustainability issues and the managed AWS Cloud hosting version is working fine for me.
Interesting take, Vince, we know some users definitely prefer to go through a third party platform!
Do you have any metrics on the BI revenue across AWS and Azure? If someone is trying to pick one cloud provider to launch their BI service, what metrics do the have to make the decision?
Hey Sam – we do not have any specific metrics! There is certainly a lot of activity in the space with Google’s recent acquisition of Looker and Salesforce’s acquisition of Tableau.
Well Amazon is the elephant in the room
I used them a lot(streaming games -Witcher 3 🙂
but now I am on Google cloud and they have everything I need:buckets for infinite cold storage,virtual machines for my windows servers and Centos servers…machines for Boinc -treating Aids and Cancer,discovering black holes and asteroids
and they also have kubernetes clusters,I cna play with AI intelligence-Mariana AI..
they dont have quantum computers yet
for that I use IBM
It says in the article that Google cloud produced $2.6bn but in the chart it says $1.8bn, that’s nearly a $1bn delta that’s not being addressed?
Anyway, the only good thing Microsoft has to offer is “VS Code” for developers, other than that, either AWS or apple products will be always better than MS ones
Because AWS and Apple have better: RDBMS, Desktop Operating systems, Office services ???
Where do you see GCP in the next 5 years?
Do you expect Google to catch-up and become number 2 or even number 1?
Also, for some who is looking to get into the cloud ecosystem and wants to pick only one to become expert at, which one do you think is Strategically the best to choose?
Hi Philippe – at this point it’s hard to see Google surpassing either AWS or Azure in market share, but it’s certainly possible. For a cloud ecosystem to learn, it really depends on your goals – for example does the industry you work in/want to work in favor a particular cloud provider; do you have any specific interests that align with one cloud’s offerings, etc. – but by default, AWS is usually agreed upon as most favorable for job prospects and robust training.
Katy – This is really difficult to analysis who is better either AWS or Azure. My concern is different I feel ,AWS is lacking in marketing of the cloud on social media , google news compared to Azure ? because of which most of the peoples are talking about Azure.
Can anyone help me out which cloud I should learn (basically I am dot net developer)
Thanks in advance.
Hi Rahul, that’s interesting, I feel the opposite! I see much more about AWS. (Do you subscribe to Last Week in AWS? https://www.lastweekinaws.com/).
As a .NET developer I’m sure many will recommend that you focus on Azure, but that doesn’t have to be the case. I would frame it in the context of your career goals, review job postings that require AWS or Azure and see what best aligns with your skills and goals.