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According to Gartner, in 2022, public cloud computing end-user spending is set to reach $494.7 billion (USD). Amazon Web Services (AWS) is dominating this industry with a 33% share. Its competitors are lagging behind, with just 21% for Microsoft Azure, and 8% for Google Cloud computing services.
However, these numbers may change in the near future. (Read Cloud Computing: Why the Buzz?)
Cloud adoption is becoming a horizontal transformation that does not involve large corporations alone. The pandemic has vastly accelerated this trend, with one-third of all IT budgets being allocated to cloud computing and a whopping 94% of enterprises of all sizes using at least one cloud service (larger enterprises use five, on average).
The top reason for cloud adoption still is providing data access from anywhere – a trend that matches perfectly our social technological evolution. In our highly interconnected society, we want access to technology at any time, from any place. In Canada, which is the country with the highest Internet penetration among G20 nations, 35% of enterprises plan on moving applications to the cloud to increase their reliability and security.
Perhaps the biggest trend today is that small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are increasingly relying upon cloud services. Cloud services are particularly appealing to SMBs as they're highly scalable and do not require a huge investment of capital to implement the digital transformation.
Unsurprisingly, AWS is the favorite cloud services provider of SMBs with a current adoption rate of 53%. However, this rate actually dropped from 60% in 2018, showing a significant negative trend which may be interpreted in many ways – the first of which may be the increased popularity of Microsoft Azure cloud services.
In 2022, Azure closed the gap in cloud spend, with a survey from Flexera showing 52% of responders spending $1.2 million or more annually on Azure – the same exact percentage of responders spending $1.2 million or more annually on AWS.
In Q1 of this year alone, AWS earned $18.44 billion (16% of Amazon’s total revenue), with a growth of 36.5% year over year in the first quarter. In contrast, Azure public cloud — which includes SQL Server, Windows Server and other enterprise services — generated $19.05 billion in revenue.
The good news for AWS is that back in 2019, when Jeff Bezos' company was focused on implementing new technologies in verticals such as machine learning analytics, augmented reality, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things, Amazon was also making strides in serverless implementation. For those using serverless technology today, 74% of users prefer AWS Lambda, followed by a mere 39% for its closest competitor, Azure Functions.
Amazon is also leading the pack when it comes to the growing trend of containerization. In 2020, 60% of back-end developers used Docker containers and Gartner predicts that 75% of enterprise applications will be containerized by the end of 2022. This means that orchestration tools for containerized software applications will be more popular than ever. Today, the most popular Kubernetes platforms are Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (39%), Azure Kubernetes Service (23%), and Azure (AKS) Engine (17%).
It's important to remember, that while Microsoft Azure is gaining market shares faster than GCP, AWS still attracts more than half (52%) of the early-stage cloud users and is still agile enough to respond to changing cloud customer needs. Keep an eye on Azure and GCP, but don't be surprised when Amazon continues to stay on top as companies of all sizes jump on the cloud bandwagon.
