This week, the cloud providers announced their quarterly earnings.
Annual run rate
- AWS $64B
- Azure $40B
- Google Cloud (+Gsuite) $20B
Year-over-Year Growth rate ( +/- previous period)
- AWS 39% (+2%)
- Azure 48% (+3%)
- Google Cloud 45% (-9%)
That's huge growth for already enormous businesses. I spend a lot of time thinking about how startups can effectively compete against these businesses – which are often bankrolled by best-in-class consumer businesses and enjoy economies of scale. Jerry Chen at Greylock calls these companies The Big Three Cloud Castles and shares some ideas in those blog posts.
It's possible for companies to compete and grow into large businesses: just look at Databricks ($38B), Snowflake ($106B), and Datadog ($52B). But as these clouds start to look at higher-margin services that they can deliver at a lower cost and with better distribution, it's becoming tougher and tougher.