Google Cloud Catching Up to AWS and Azure

AWS and Azure have dominated the cloud computing market for years but are now facing a challenge from Google.

Google cloud is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search and YouTube. Alongside a set of management tools, it provides a series of modular cloud services including computing, data storage, data analytics and machine learning.

Google recently revealed its cloud business unit now has an $8 billion annual revenue run rate, double the $4 billion it reported last year.

To put that into perspective, AWS’s run rate topped $30 billion last quarter while Microsoft Azure is somewhere around $11 billion.

Total AWS revenue reached $8.381 billion – equivalent to about 13 percent of Amazon’s total revenue for the quarter, and up from $6.105 billion in last year’s Q2, and pushing AWS’s run rate of more than $33 billion.

“Q2 was another strong quarter for Google Cloud, which reached an annual revenue run rate of over $8 billion and continues to grow at a significant pace,”

Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced in his company’s call.

“Customers are choosing Google Cloud for a variety of reasons: reliability and uptime are critical. Retailers like Lowe’s are leveraging the cloud as one of the important tools to transform their customer experience and supply chain.”

Google recently launched Anthos, its first dedicated hybrid platform, offering customers more flexibility and choice in their cloud migrations.

Pichai also noted that customers want the flexibility to move to the cloud in their own way, something that some of Google’s competitors — and especially Microsoft — focused on before Google got to this point. With Anthos and other initiatives, the company is now catching up, though.