Amazon and Google Vie for Control of the Cloud IaaS Market

Google Computer Engine and Amazon Web Services are the two major players in the Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) industry, which seeks to provide affordable cloud services to businesses. This system works because the service providers alleviate smaller businesses from the pressure and financial burden of owning and maintaining cloud infrastructure for its own business networks, and the two companies are large enough to offer customers competitive pricing. However, as more competing IaaS providers prove to be too small to match the power of Google or Amazon, it is starting to appear that Amazon Web Services just might win the war on an IaaS monopoly.

One of the best ways to picture IaaS is like a utilities company, where instead of water or electricity being delivered to a business, cloud storage and data are delivered instead. Because Amazon and Google both have some of the most powerful computer networks on earth, they are able to maintain and operate these networks in bulk for much lower costs than individual providers, again similar to how utility companies work.

In the future, cloud data is expected to be just as common and necessary as electricity and water are, and currently Google and Amazon are in the position to become the major utility company that provides it. By the end of the decade, the combined revenue of both companies is expected to surpass over $40 billion, which is a prize that both companies are seeking to get the biggest slice of.

While Google Drive and Gmail are prominent in the minds of consumers, Amazon Web Services has been renting computer power and storage space to companies for several years already. The two have been dropping subscription prices to the point where both now cost around the same amount of money, yet sheer experience places AWS almost a decade ahead of Google. Still, the battle is not yet won, as Google maintains the computer infrastructure and the technical expertise to build up its service, and potentially even eclipse AWS as the premier Cloud IaaS provider.