Today, we’ll take a look at the latest AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud market share comparison, including the Q4 2020 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 February 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
First, the big news, of course: Jeff Bezos is trading his CEO role for Executive Chair of the Amazon Board, while current CEO of AWS Andy Jassy will step up to the Amazon CEO role. No AWS CEO has yet been announced, but many bets are on Matt Garman, currently the Vice President of AWS Sales and Marketing, or else Peter DeSantis, AWS’s Vice President of Global Infrastructure.
Next, the bigger news: Amazon revenue. 
Amazon reported Amazon Web Services (AWS) revenue of $12.7 billion for Q4 2020, compared to $9.95 billion for Q4 2019. AWS revenue grew 28% in the quarter.
Amazon as a whole had their first quarter over the $100 billion mark, at $125.56 billion. That’s an increase of 44% year-over-year, and beating predictions of $119.7 billion. Earnings per share were $14.09, compared to a $7.23 forecast.
Amazon as a whole benefitted from an astronomical online holiday shopping season due to COVID-19, and also from Prime Day being held in the fourth quarter. And AWS? It made up 10% of Amazon’s sales for the quarter – and 52% of its operating income.AWS only continues to grow, and bolster the retail giant time after time.
One thing to keep in mind: you’ll see a couple of headlines pointing out that revenue growth is down and/or highlighting the fact that it’s flattening out, quoting that 28% number and comparing it to previous quarters’ growth rates, which peaked at 81% in 2015. However, that metric is of questionable value as AWS continues to increase revenue at this enormous scale (see Geekwire graph), and dominate the market (as we’ll see below). AWS added more revenue quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year than any quarter in its history. Dave Fildes, Director of Investor Relations, mentioned on the call that “If you account for this COVID anomaly this year of [AWS re:Invent] being virtual and free, AWS year-over-year revenue growth, if you look at it, actually accelerated adjusting for that from the third quarter to the fourth quarter,” an interesting tidbit both from the perspective of gaining a glimpse into what re:Invent actually does for the company, and that AWS revenue is accelerating.
Azure
While Amazon specifies AWS revenue, Microsoft only reports on Azure’s growth rate. That number is 50% revenue growth over the previous quarter. This time last year, growth was reported at 62%. As mentioned above, comparing growth rates to growth rates is interesting, but not necessarily as useful a metric as actual revenue numbers – which we don’t have for Azure alone.
Here are the revenue numbers Microsoft does report. Azure is under the “Intelligent Cloud” business, which grew 23% to $14.6 billion. The operating group also includes server products and cloud services (26% growth).
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 36% of total consolidated operating income.
Google Cloud
In more exciting news for public cloud followers, Alphabet has broken out Google Cloud revenue for the first time. Thus we learned that while Google Cloud revenue has increased over the last three years, so too have their operating losses. CFO Ruth Porat notes that these operating losses “reflect that we have meaningfully built out our organization, ahead of revenue.”
This quarter, Google Cloud reported revenue of $3.83 billion, an increase of 47% year-over-year. Operating losses were $1.24 billion compared to losses of $1.19 billion one year previously. For the full fiscal year 2020, Google Cloud’s revenue was $13 billion, with $5.6 billion operating losses.
Note that the Google Cloud unit includes not only Google Cloud Platform but also Google Workspace (formerly G Suite).
One highlight was that deals over $250 million tripled during 2020, and several billion-dollar deals were closed during the year.
Alibaba Cloud
We’ll add Alibaba Cloud to this list for the first time as the cloud computing division is profitable as of this quarter. The cloud computing arm of the Chinese retail giant earned $2.47 billion this quarter, an increase of 50% year-over-year.
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 February 2021, Canalys reports that the worldwide cloud market grew 32% this quarter to $39.9 billion. For the full year of 2020, cloud infrastructure spending grew 33% to $142 billion. AWS has 31% of the market, followed by Azure at 20%, 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.
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.