The big 3 (Google, Microsoft & Amazon) have all been battling it out when it comes to vying for market share in the incredibly lucrative space of cloud hosting. A July 2018 report studying the market share and growth of these platforms found that while Amazon’s AWS still leads the field with 41.5% market share, Microsoft’s Azure is quickly gaining ground and sits at 29.4%, while Google’s Cloud Platform is 3rd at a paltry 3%. It is no secret that all three companies have devoted an extensive amount of resources towards this sector of their business, and with good reason as Gartner predicts that the Infrastructure-as-a-service market will grow to reach $40.8 billion in 2018.
Microsoft made the latest big move in attempts to make their case even stronger as they recently acquired Lobe, an easy to use drag & drop machine learning tool which will sit on top of Azure. This will allow people who may not necessarily have the technical expertise needed to build intense machine learning models to be able to leverage whatever vast amounts of data they possess and apply powerful machine learning models to gain powerful insight which can generate value in a plethora of different ways.
This news continues a series of acquisitions Microsoft has made in this space as of late, and reiterates the commitment this massive technology giant has made towards strengthening their infrastructure-as-a-service offerings. Google Cloud Platform, although smaller in marketshare compared to its rivals, had a leg-up on both AWS and Azure in this space with their Machine Learning tools such as Tensorflow, which is an industry leader at this point in time.
The onus now shifts to Amazon, who needs to up their game in comparison to the others. While AWS does have slew of Machine Learning tools and integrations available, they have yet to stake their claim with something proprietary or game changing. However, knowing AWS and their dominance in this market, you can rest assured that they are probably working on something as we speak and will continue to innovate as they have done over the last few years, showing us why they are the leaders in this space to begin with.
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Regardless of what happens, one thing is for sure — we as application developers end up the winners. For us, these services make incredibly complicated and sophisticated technologies that would otherwise require a team of engineers & data scientists for us to leverage, become easily accessible with just an API integration and some fundamental knowledge. This will enable a new generation of app developers to come up with creative ways to utilize these tools and build remarkable new technology driven products & solutions. We can’t wait to play with Lobe and all the other tools that get introduced in the coming months & years.
