Global cloud IaaS/PaaS vendor revenue share 2018-2021

With a revenue share of 25.9 percent in the year to end June 2021, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the leader in the global infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) market. IBM is AWS' biggest competitor, having secured a market portion of 14.9 percent in the same period. Total revenues from IaaS and PaaS amounted to 179 billion U.S. dollars.

What is infrastructure as a service?

Infrastructure as a service is a cloud computing service model that delivers virtualized computing resources over the internet. These include the basic infrastructure components which are hardware, networking, storage, and servers, to which customers can get access to through a pay-as-you-go model. The key advantages of this model are the shift from capital expenditure (CAPEX) to operational expenditure (OPEX) as well as the ability to scale the infrastructure as needed.

What is platform as a service?

In a similar manner, platform as a service allows organizations to purchase resources from a service provider for their cloud computing needs. Notably, PaaS includes a complete development and deployment environment that enables the delivery of both simple apps and enterprise applications. In other words, PaaS includes infrastructure as well as middleware and development tools.