This was a question I answered on Quora.

Google Cloud

The only ones who are truly capable of answering this are Google themselves. But I am not sure if they know themselves.

In the end large cloud providers target large corporations. However, what are the workloads targeted?

My hunch is that they are creating it for people like themselves, who are solving the problems they were facing themselves, in the way that they were doing it themselves.

Remember, Google got big by being able to ruthlessly and massively scale distributed computing to analyse the world’s information. A large ambition, but one that they are successful with.

Case in point is Google Apps Engine, which was way ahead of its time in 2008 for scalable computation. This screenshot is from 2015 (look at the uptime: 2247 days is over 6 years). Just imagine how often the physical hardware of this application must have changed without the application noticing.

 

Google Cloud has a lot of great features for Big Data, where basically the underlying complexity of the machine resources is hidden much better than with AWS or Microsoft.

In short, Big Data seems to be core of the target market of Google. Go research TensorFlow to figure out how committed they are to that (hint: they build custom hardware for that).

What about AWS?

Interestingly, AWS was also focussed on solving their own problems first, in the way they were doing it, which was building a massive webshop in an agile way. Hence the initial focus on storage, virtual machines and APIs. In general, features that much more reflect ‘traditional’ software deployment paradigms. This is probably why AWS took off with startups much quicker than Google did.