Last week saw Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft all reported stunning growth in their respective cloud computing segments. The numbers underline what IT watchers have known for some time already – that there’s an almost insatiable appetite for the public cloud among developers – and each of the “Big Three” providers took the opportunity to explain how they’re differentiating their cloud platforms by adding unique features to appeal to different market segments.

Amazon: Analytics, business intelligence, making the transition easy

The standout news from last week was AWS’ stunning growth. The company said its cloud platform generated $2.085 billion in revenues in the third quarter, amounting to a whopping 78 percent year-on-year growth.

Cloud analyst Jillian Freeman told TechTarget that AWS is the most dominant provider by far, holding around 25 percent of the overall cloud market. And she said the company’s position is growing even stronger due to strategic moves by IT vendors like Rackspace Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co., which are shuttering their own private cloud offerings in favor of using AWS as a component of their hybrid clouds.

Alongside this ‘help’ it’s been receiving, Amazon has also introduced a raft of new features this year to justify its number one position in the market, such as its new Amazon QuickSight business intelligence tool to help companies glean insights from their data, and the new SPICE engine that delivers rapid data visualizations and advanced calculations, and is able to scale to thousands of users. In addition, Amazon has also been striving to make it easier for companies to move their data to the public cloud. This endeavor has seen it launch a new data transport appliance called AWS Snowball, which is essentially a massive server that Amazon ships out to companies so they can upload their data (up to 50 TB) and ship it back to Amazon to upload in the cloud. We also saw the introduction of Amazon Kinesis Firehose, a new service that automatically uploads and performs near-real time analysis on streaming data from thousands of disparate sources.

Amazon is going down the same path with its database tools too. Following the launch of Amazon Aurora last summer (now AWS’s fastest growing service) the company rolled out a Database Migration Service to ensure migrations go without a hitch, and Schema Conversion Tool that ports schemas and procedures so Oracle and SQL Server apps can be shifted to Aurora and other databases without a hitch.

Microsoft: The one-stop cloud shop for all your enterprise IT needs

Microsoft actually showed even greater cloud revenues according to its third quarter earnings report. However we should note that Redmond’s reporting is quite complex, with its Azure cloud revenues bunched together with its “Intelligent Cloud” business, which also comprises Windows Server, SQL Server, System Center, Visual Studio, and its enterprise services.

In total, Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud division pulled in $5.9 billion in revenues, which represents 14 percent growth when taking currency exchange fluctuations into consideration. Microsoft also said Azure’s revenues and compute usage more than doubled compared to the same quarter last year.

On the conference call, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella pointed to premium services like Advanced Threat Analytics and Azure Data Lake as factors that differentiate Azure from its rivals. The CEO added that he believed Azure is quite different to other public clouds because it’s not an isolated service, but rather just one of several cloud services.

“We think about it in the combination of Office 365, Dynamics, EMS,” Nadella explained. “Because really it’s one cloud infrastructure, first of all, from a capital perspective that sort of serves all of these.”

Google: The developer’s cloud?

Google, or rather, Alphabet Inc., reported $18.7 billion in revenues for the third quarter, representing a total revenue growth of 13 percent compared to the year before.

Google still isn’t talking specific cloud numbers, but the company’s senior vice president and CFO did say that Google Cloud Platform ranked alongside Google Play and Google for Work as key growth drivers.

Most likely the real reason Google doesn’t want to report specific cloud numbers is because they’re not nearly as impressive as AWS’s or Microsoft’s. After all, it’s hard to believe Google wouldn’t want to blow its own trumpet if it was able to hold its ground against those two. But Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai was happy to talk about Google’s cloud strategy going forward, in particular how it aims to differentiate itself from its main rivals.

According to Pichai, instead of competing on sheer cloud infrastructure, Google will focus on building a robust platform that’s specifically aimed at application developers. And that means not just the basic things like compute and storage, but more importantly, a complete set of services to go on top of that.

“I think the way we will differentiate over time is because we have built large services on top of our infrastructure, we understand all the layers which you need to build great application,” Pichai said. “So you would see us increasingly provide value-added services on top of compute and storage.”

Pichai reminded his audience that Google was a little bit slower to the public cloud game than AWS or Microsoft, having only really gone hard at it in the past two years. Nonetheless, he said Google’s cloud is seeing “tremendous momentum” with developers, adding that “we are investing a lot and playing for the long-term.”

Image credit: Stevebidmead via pixabay.com