Multi-Cloud History of AWS, Azure, and GCP

Lately, I have been taking multiple cloud computing courses in PluralSight, Udemy, and Qwiklabs. This is to serve as a refresher and to learn new concepts in AWS, Azure, and GCP. I thought I'd share some of the notes from those courses.

AWS History:

2002 - AWS Beta was released offering SOAP, & XML services for product catalog
2004 - Amazon introduced SQS services, which is simple queue service or managed message queue services to decouple and scale microservies, distributed systems, and serverless applications
2006 - AWS officially launched in March 2006. It offered 3 main services. They are 1)S3 or simple storage service, 2) EC2 or Elastic Compute Cloud, 3) SQS.
2009 - AWS was launched in Europe. It provided services such as S3, EC2. Also, EBS (Elastic Block Store), CDN (Content Delivery Network), CloudFront become part of AWS services.
2010 - Amazon.com migrated to AWS in November 2010.
2012 - First time, AWS generated $1.5 billion revenue. They started "Reinvent" conference at that time. This is a customer focused summit where they announce newer services on annual basis.
2013 - AWS Certifications were introduced.
2015 - AWS had $1.57 billion sale with $250 million in operating income. Each month they had more than a million active customers in 190 countries. That included 2,000 government agencies, 5,000 educational Institutes, and 5,000+ non-profits.
2017 - AWS annual revenue grew to $17.4 billion.
2018 - AWS annual revenue grew to $25.65 billion.
2019 - AWS offered more than 140 services in 23 different categories in compute, database, security, storage etc... In each year, Reinvent conference, AWS introduces newer servies based on customer feedback.

AWS Customers:

Netflix, NASA, Expedia, Slack, Samsung, Adobe, Comcast, AirBNB, Lyft, Dow Jones

Case studies are available in:
https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/all/

Benefits:

AWS manages infrastructure
Provides multi-data center redundant storage and compute
High Performance, reliable infrastructure for all size orgs

Low cost:

No need to maintain high cost data centers
Good for startups
Low cost migration for large enterprises

Scalability:

World wide resource availability
Scales with usage demand

Security and Reliability:

Better at handling intrusions, outages, potential security threats
More secure compared to on-premise data centers (for small companies)

Azure History:

2008 - Microsoft started internal cloud project named "Project Red Dog"
2010 - Windows Azure debuts commercially. Initially, there were bumps as there were lack of documentations, difficult to use web UI, less mature than AWS.
2014 - They rebranded the cloud service as Microsoft Azure.
2019 - Microsoft has more than 160 services in many different categories. Each year they add more services.

Azure Customers:

Their customers are mostly Fortune 500 companies. It's 90% of their base.
They add 1,000 new customers each month.
Azure gets adopted due to attachment with Microsoft products
Rolls Royce, GE, Flipkart, Ebay, Samsung, Dell, Johnson Controls

Case studies are available in:
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/case-studies

GCP History:

Launched by Google
They focus on Big Data, Machine Learning, and container management/orchestration tools
They have good reputation of running high performance data centers around the world
2008 - GCP was launched initiating the big three competition between AWS, Azure, GCP. GCP ranks 3rd in terms of revenue behind AWS, and Azure.
2008 - App Engine launched using python as the supported language with space limitation of 500 MB and bandwidth of 10 GB/S. This was to enable developers to implement web applications.
2009 - App engined had free tier and allowed developers to purchase more compute resources. In April 2009, GCP added support for Java.
2010 - Google added Cloud Storage service.
2012 - Compute engine was added to the service.
2014 - GCP was launched in Asia Pacific in April 2014.
2014 - Firebase mobile development platform was added to GCP in October 2014.
2016 - GCP added support for NLP (Natural Language Processing), and Cloud Speech API
2019 - There are more than 90 services available.

GCP Customers:

Key Differentiator:
---- low cost, data analytics, machine learning and AI services
Target, Twitter, PayPal, Bloomberg, Ebay, AllState

Case studies are available in:
https://cloud.google.com/customers