Oversize #6: Google’s multi-cloud bet

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Editor's note: According to the market research firm Canalys, in 2019, Amazon led the public cloud market with a 32.3% market share followed by Microsoft with a 16.9% share. As the distant third runner, with about 6% market share, Google Cloud last year placed a big bet—on a service Anthos. It was a calculated risk to demonstrate the company’s commitment to the cloud (The Information reported that the top brass at Google parent Alphabet Inc. debated exiting the business entirely in 2018) and chart a strategy to attract customers from the competition. Anthos is a fully managed infrastructure service that runs across mainstream public cloud environments. Essentially, it lets you write your applications once, deploy anywhere—in Google Cloud Platform, in your data centre or on other cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. This is what is usually called a multi-cloud service. The early days of cloud computing were dominated by Amazon, and then Microsoft, Google, Alibaba and the rest joined in; the initial concept was that a company would use a single public cloud provider, shifting their applications and …