Dive Brief:

• The multicloud strategy is driving efficiency, sidestepping vendor lock-in, lowering costs and improving application reliability for companies — and increasingly cropping up in tech companies' earnings calls as a crucial IT and cost savings strategy, according to a CB Insights report. 
• Microservices have undergirded the adoption of multicloud in the enterprise, supported by cost- and resource-efficient containers that run the individual services independently, APIs to link microservices together and easy updates, according to the report. But microservices also add complexity to the cloud environment by increasing the number of components, hastening the rise of third-party tools.
• Cloud providers have to build support for third party, multicloud tools, especially developers' essentials and favorites, according to CB Insights. Google Cloud Platform has created open-source container management and orchestration tools that can be used across cloud platforms, encouraging multicloud strategy; Docker grew to the most popular containerization tool, with 49% adoption by tech professionals in 2018. 

Dive Insight:

Amazon's retail arm continues to drive a wedge between its cloud business and large retail clients, a boon for Microsoft and Google. The rise of multicloud is also pushing more business to the No. 2 and No. 3 providers. But Amazon's comfortable hold on the top spot remains. 

Microsoft and Google have benefited from sharp growth this year, with 98.2% and 62.7% revenue growth in 2017, respectively. The growth in the top providers has come at the expense of small and mid-sized providers, which face a shrinking market share.

The big three each provide a robust, stable solution for companies looking to the cloud, which makes distinguishing between them more difficult for companies embarking on their first or a new migration. Yet there are still distinct strengths for each player, according to the CB Insights report: 

• AWS: One-third of IaaS and PaaS market share; 140 services across 19 categories
• Azure: Often less expensive for running VMs by billing per minute and rounding down; data centers in more regions globally; most total applications for cloud patents
• GCP: fastest SSL CDN; backs more open-source projects; greater focus on IoT; higher IaaS customer satisfaction