Cloud Providers
Overview
Cloud service providers are companies that establish public clouds, manage private clouds, or offer on-demand cloud computing components (also known as cloud computing services) like Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service(SaaS). Cloud services can reduce business process costs when compared to on-premise IT.
Why use a cloud provider?
Using a cloud provider is a helpful way to access computing services that you would otherwise have to provide on your own, such as:
-
Infrastructure: The foundation of every computing environment. This infrastructure could include networks, database services, data management, data storage (known in this context as cloud storage), servers (cloud is the basis for serverless computing), and virtualization.
-
Platforms: The tools needed to create and deploy applications. These platforms could include operating systems like Linux®, middleware, and runtime environments.
-
Software: Ready-to-use applications. This software could be custom or standard applications provided by independent service providers.
Public cloud provider vs. managed private cloud
| Public cloud providers | Managed private cloud |
|---|---|
| Public cloud providers virtualize their own infrastructure, platforms, or applications from hardware they own, and then pool all that into data lakes that they orchestrate with management and automation software before transmitting it across the internet to their end users. | Also known as managed cloud service providers, private cloud providers serve customers a private cloud that's deployed, configured, and managed by someone other than the customer. It's a cloud delivery option that helps enterprises with understaffed or underskilled IT teams provide better private cloud services and cloud infrastructure to users. |
Certified cloud providers
There are a handful of well-known, major public cloud companies—such as Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and Microsoft Azure — but there are also hundreds of other cloud computing providers all over the world such as Heroku , Cloudflare etc.