[dangerbird2]

Azure is Microsoft's cash cow, and probably saved the company after its low point in the 2010s. Basically any tech company that doesn't want to use AWS (i.e. anyone working with retail) or Oracle (i.e. anyone who values their mental health) is going to use Azure for their infrastructure.

[deepsun]

Umm, no, they go GCP. At least in my circles.

[pleb_nz]

A hell of a lot of people and business don't trust GCP from what I garnered reading online forums, blogs and articles.

Too many services terminated or changed too often.

I've also read in the past their service and sales was diabolical.

Their market share reflects their reputation is my guess.

On a side note, in my region people go azure or aws or use one of local hosting service providers. GCP doesn't even get a mention.

[deepsun]

I feel like there's a strong anti-marketing.

I personally never experienced any services terminated, and it sounds unplausible that anyone would terminate a service that brings money. Especially major ones like GCS or GCE. I can only remember AppEngine's TaskManager (wasn't terminated, but refactored into Cloud Tasks, to be not AppEngine-specific). They probably terminate only services that no one pays for anyway. Maybe you've used Alpha-Beta features that were supposed to be changed/killed later?

> I've also read in the past their service and sales was diabolical.

Quite the opposite: Microsoft sales are diabolical. AWS also actively poaches all around the valley. I'd say Google is lacking behind mostly on that kind of marketing/sales.

Market share is a tricky thing: AWS opened up Cloud first, so it's not surprising to be #1. Microsoft had very strong presence in enterprises and government, so it was easy for them to onboard existing customers. Also, Microsoft counted Azure under "Web Services" category (together with online Outlook or Office 360), and it's not clear what share of that was Azure.

> in my region people go azure or aws

I feel for them as I think they fell into marketing charms. Because, technically, Azure is the worst, I'd never choose it. AWS is a strong choice (nobody got fired for choosing AWS).

[pleb_nz]

Interesting.

Personally and professionally I've never used Azure myself. But I would likely choose Azure over GCP if I had to make a choice between the two. But maybe it's worth reevaluating.

My impressions are purely based on reading articles, news, market saturation data points and talking with people. I really have no intermit experience with GCP in the last 7 years.

[Tagbert]

It looks like the shares are AWS:32%, Azure:19%, GCP:7% of the total cloud storage market.

https://www.parkmycloud.com/blog/aws-vs-azure-vs-google-clou...

[deepsun]

Known trick -- Azure is grouped together under "Intelligent Cloud", which last time I checked included Outlook Online and Office 360. They only report on Azure "growth" percentage, but not revenue, like AWS.