Reuters
Perhaps equally eye-opening: The No.2 cloud service by usage, Microsoft's Azure cloud, has twice as much compute capacity as the next 13 players combined (not including Amazon).
This just goes to show the gigantic size of the industry's leaders and why it's so hard to compete with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft.
Cloud computing allows companies to run many of their operations by renting computing power from special providers instead of operating their own data centers. It's a hot market.
After all, Amazon Web Services is a $6 billion business.
The key to Amazon's growth here, as Gartner's report indicates, is the sheer number of outside developers it's attracted to make their software available from Amazon's cloud. If you're an IT guy, chances are pretty good that you can find the tools you need to get a modern business up and running on Amazon Web Services pretty easily.
"Although [Amazon Web Services] will not be the ideal fit for every need, it has become the 'safe choice' in this market, appealing to customers who desire the broadest range of capabilities and long-term market leadership," says the report.
In other words, Amazon can't be everything to everybody - Gartner attributes much of the Microsoft Azure cloud's growth to its strong integrations with the rest of Microsoft's server and software suites, even if it's still working on getting more developers on board.
For Google Cloud Platform, widely accepted to be the number-three player in the cloud computing space,
Gartner credits the success of Google Cloud Platform, which is widely assumed to be number-three cloud player by revenue, to its friendliness towards developing new kinds of applications that are so-called "cloud native" and not beholden to old ways of doing things.
It's in the harder-to-reach niches that many of the other cloud providers mentioned in the report fall: Rackspace Hosting can't compete at Amazon's level, so it focuses on white-glove support; Virtustream focuses heavily on helping customers run more complex, old-school applications from vendors like Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP.
But for the vast majority of the world, Amazon Web Service is good enough, Microsoft Windows Azure integrates well enough, and Google Cloud Platform is developer-friendly enough to meet their needs.
Time was, nobody got fired for buying IBM. These days, nobody gets fired for buying Amazon.
Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through hispersonal investment company Bezos Expeditions.