☁️ The Big 3 Cloud Cartel: Meet the New Vendors You’ll Blame on Monday
The Cloud Decoder – Part 1 🆓 Free Version
Remember when all your problems lived in a rack down the hall?
Now they live in “the cloud,” which is just someone else’s rack — plus a line item on your CFO’s migraine budget.
Welcome to The Cloud Decoder, a new series translating cloud jargon into sysadmin English.
No marketing fluff. No “digital transformation” buzzwords. Just real comparisons for IT pros who still call it a folder, not an object container.
☁️ Meet the Cloud Cartel
The “cloud” boils down to three megacorps fighting for your workloads, your wallet, and your soul:
🟧 AWS (Amazon Web Services)
The original and still the biggest.
Think of AWS as that one data center guy who labels everything with acronyms and charges you per label.
🟦 Microsoft Azure
The enterprise darling.
If your boss says, “we’re a Microsoft shop,” congratulations — you’re now an Azure customer whether you like it or not.
🟥 Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
The smart kid with great ideas who occasionally forgets to support their products for more than three years.
And then there’s the “everybody else” tier — Oracle, IBM, Alibaba — a.k.a. “We exist too!”
📊 Market Share Snapshot
AWS: ~30–35% (King of the hill)
Azure: ~20–25% (Riding Microsoft’s coattails into the enterprise)
GCP: ~10% (The clever underdog who still gets picked last)
Basically:
Amazon built it, Microsoft sold it, and Google made it cool (but still lost market share).
🧩 If You’re Old School…
Here’s a quick translation guide for your sanity:
On-Prem Term → Cloud Term → Translation
Server → Instance / VM
Same thing, now with 12 billing options.Storage → Bucket / Blob / Object
A fancy folder that costs you per GB and per operation.VLAN → VPC / Subnet
Network isolation, but abstract enough to cause panic.Firewall → Security Group / ACL
Firewalls that default to “deny everything, including your sanity.”
🤔 Why So Many Names for the Same Thing?
Because branding.
Every vendor wants you to feel like their “compute” is unique — even though under the hood, it’s still just someone else’s Linux box.
🚀 Next Week: Speak Cloudish
We’ll decode all the cloud buzzwords:
Blob, Lambda, Resource Group, Serverless, and why “no servers” somehow means more servers than ever.
💰 Want the Full Breakdown?
Upgrade to the Extended Edition for:
A deeper dive into pricing models and how each vendor quietly charges you for breathing.
Comparison of portal layouts, management tools, and support plans.
Which vendor fits which type of company (SMB, Enterprise, Startup).
How to build a free-tier lab without accidentally triggering a $700 bill.
JJ – Chief Packet Pusher