Public Cloud Vendors
Public cloud vendors are those that run elastic compute workloads and storage in their global data centres on behalf of customers. Unless otherwise specified, cloud vendors are normally assumed to belong to this category.
Azure: Azure, Microsoft’s cloud services division, may appear to be a cloud for Microsoft Windows software but this is a misconception since it has a clear Linux-first strategy. Examples are the Azure Container Service (AKS) which runs on Kubernetes, the native Linux support in .NET Core and the availability of as a service products typical of Linux ecosystems such as Redis.
IBM Cloud: IBM Cloud (formerly Bluemix) is attractive not necessarily to IBM legacy shops but to those organisations that expect intense use of IBM cloud offerings such as Watson.
Google Cloud Platform: Google’s cloud platform focuses on Google-specific as a service offerings primarily in the ML/AI space. One of its key services is Spanner; a geo-distributed SQL database that relies on atomic clocks for its transactional guarantees. Like AWS and Azure, it also offers the typical compute, storage, and networking, software-defined services but it focuses more on Kubernetes and Google App Engine for PaaS/FaaS workloads.
OpenShift Online: RedHat OpenShift Online is a heavily customised managed Kubernetes service that, similarly to what Samsung does to Android, tries to impose a variety of lock-in inducive proprietary services. For example, most DockerHub public images (e.g. Nginx) fail to run because RedHat wants images to run under an random user id rather than root.
Rackspace: Rackspace was a traditionally hosting provider that is trying to reinvent itself as a cloud alternative to the big three.