Public cloud refers to a computing service model used for the provisioning of storage and computational services to the general public over the internet.

Public cloud facilitates access to IT resources on a “pay as you go” billing model. A service provider manages a public cloud solution’s core infrastructure, software and other back-end architecture in a multitenant environment in order to free up the customer from these responsibilities.

Choosing the right public cloud provider is becoming an increasingly nuanced discussion that goes well beyond scale. There are three major players in the public cloud platforms arena – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft’s Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. The top cloud computing companies are addressing a large and growing market. In turn, they provide a wide array of cloud-related products and services, including infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service solutions (SaaS).