zlacker

I don't think a cloud provider that is _just_ a cloud provider exists. All of the cloud providers I can think of (AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle Cloud, IBM Cloud, Baidu, etc) are subsidiaries of larger corporations whose profit centers are elsewhere.

The capital requirements needed to spin up a public cloud and the services that come with that are absolutely massive. It makes me think that cloud computing, despite the gigantic profits it brings in, is not sustainable on its own.

>>nunez+(OP)
For what it’s worth, Amazon’s largest profit center is AWS. Likewise for Microsoft and Azure.

>>davkan+ax1
That's the case now, yes. However, EC2 and S3 were started by using idle compute for .com, which they had boatloads of due to their size, and Windows Azure was originally meant to be an app hosting platform for .NET apps running on Windows.

The only other companies I can think of that tried being/are trying to be _just_ cloud provider are Rackspace (which has been barely hanging on as the CSPs are eating their lunch) and Hetzner (who seem to be doing okay), but both of these companies lean more towards "hosting provider" (i.e. renting compute is their business) rather than "cloud provider" (i.e. providing platforms for many use cases).

>>nunez+3H7
Yes I agree there is no pure hosting/cloud company that comes close to the scale of the big 3 who also use their cloud infrastructure expertise and inventory to subsidize all the other parts of their businesses. Maybe it’s only possible to be reach the top if you already have all the money and infrastructure in the world, but just pointing out that for the top two cloud providers these platforms are at the core of their business and are their most profitable units.