The market share, influence, and adoption of AWS

For the first nine years of AWS's existence, Amazon did not break down its AWS sales, and since 2015 Amazon started reporting AWS sales separately. As of April 2022, Microsoft does not fully break down its Azure revenue and profit in its quarterly reports. They disclosed their Azure revenue growth rate without reporting the actual revenue number, instead burying Azure revenues in a bucket called Commercial Cloud, which also includes items such as Office 365 revenue. Google has been cagey about breaking down its Google Cloud Platform (GCP) revenue for a long time. Google finally broke down its GCP revenue in February 2019, but GCP also combines its cloud and workplace (G-suite) tools in the same bucket.

AWS has a large market share with a $74B run rate in 2021 and 37% year-over-year growth, which is phenomenal for a business of its size. As of 2021, AWS is leading cloud IaaS with 39% of the market share as per TechRadar’s global cloud market report. AWS has done a great job of protecting its market share by adding more and more services, adding features to existing services, building higher-level functionality on top of the core services it already offers, and educating the masses on how to best use these services.

We are in an exciting period when it comes to cloud adoption. Until a few years ago, many C-suite executives were leery of adopting cloud technologies to run their mission-critical and core services. A common concern was that they felt having on-premises implementations was more secure than running their workloads on the cloud.

It has become apparent to most of them that running workloads on the cloud can be just as secure as running them on-premises. There is no perfectly secure environment, and it seems that almost every other day, we hear about sensitive information being left exposed on the internet by yet another company. But having an army of security experts on your side, as is the case with the major cloud providers, will often beat any security team that most companies can procure on their own.

The current state of the cloud market for most enterprises is a state of Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO). Chief executives are watching their competitors jumping on the cloud, and they are concerned that they will be left behind if they don't leap.

Additionally, we see an unprecedented level of disruption in many industries propelled by the power of the cloud. Let's take the example of Lyft and Uber. Both companies rely heavily on cloud services to power their infrastructure, and old-guard companies in the space, such as Hertz and Avis, that depend on older on-premises technology are getting left behind. Part of the problem is the convenience that Uber and Lyft offer by being able to summon a car on demand. But the inability to upgrade their systems to leverage cloud technologies undoubtedly played a role in their diminishing share of the car rental market.

Let's continue learning some of the basic cloud terminologies and AWS terminology.