What the Terraform Provider registry says on the cloud market share

5 min readNov 3, 2023

In recent years, I have come across numerous studies concerning the distribution of the cloud market share, and I have personally conducted a comprehensive analysis of the annual reports of the three major cloud service providers, as detailed in this article. Nonetheless, it appears that Microsoft and Google are deliberately refraining from divulging the actual revenue generated by their cloud divisions. Curiously, their reports include earnings from Microsoft Office and Google Suite solutions within the income of their respective cloud divisions, resulting in some discrepancies. Could this practice be an attempt to mask their true market share?

Instead of using cloud providers annual report, the idea appeared to me to use the terraform provider download statistics to analyze the cloud provider market share. Also, it gives you some good hints about the most trending cloud providers currently with the current month/current year downloaded stats.

Terraform being widely adopted and being now the standard way to provision cloud infrastructure, the figures that I am going to show you in this study seems pretty relevant to me.

**Warning: The amount of Terraform downloads shows the number of users using a cloud provider, which is not a proof of revenue.

AWS is number one and by far

Just to mention, I am not working for AWS and I am actually praising for smaller cloud providers to grow and grasp market share.

AWS terraform provider has been downloaded more than 2 billion time since its inception. It’s more than twice the downloads of Azure and GCP combined (800 millions downloads together).

Looking at the yearly download, AWS has been downloaded 700 million time whereas GCP has been downloaded 190M and Azure 140M time.

Looking at the yearly downloads, and imagining a cloud market with only AWS, Azure and GCP, we could say that AWS has 65% market share and Azure and GCP only 35% combined.

Azure may not be Number 2

In the previous years, all studies have always placed Microsoft Azure as the N°2 cloud provider. Studies were also showing that Azure was closing the gap on AWS and that Azure was better positioned than any other vendors to maybe overtake AWS in the near future thanks to its large enterprise customer base.

The terraform provider downloads shows that in terms of usage and number of users at least, Azure may not be N°2 but probably N°3 slightly behind GCP. Indeed, looking at the yearly download, GCP has been downloaded 190M vs 140M for Azure.

But maybe Microsoft sells better than AWS and Google and has larger customer that are ready to pay more and this could explain it all.

Kubernetes Terraform provider has tremendous success

The Kubernetes Terraform provider has been downloaded 120M time this year only which ranks it in 4th position. The Kubernetes terraform provider allows to deploy Vanilla Kubernetes on all cloud providers. It shows that Kubernetes is really the de-facto standard to deploy and manage cloud infrastructure nowadays. The Terraform module that handles Amazon Kubernetes cluster (EKS) has been downloaded 10 times less this year (15 million). DevOps simply love the cloud agnostic power of Kubernetes.

Oracle at the intersection between Hyperscalers and Smaller cloud provider

Oracle cloud is really at the crossroad between Hyperscalers and alternative cloud providers. If I respected the scale of the downloads on the above charts, we would barely see Oracle and the smaller providers.

Oracle terraform provider has been downloaded 10 Million time this year which is 20 times less than Google Cloud. From a bottom up perspective, it is 10 times more than Digital Ocean that has been dowloaded almost 1 Million time.

Smaller vendors are very close to each other

Looking at smaller vendors, we can see that the number of downloads doesn’t show significant differences. If we aggregate Scaleway, DO, Linode, Hetzner, OVH, Ionos, HPE, Outscale, we are around 5 million downloads this year and 12 million over all time.

I was very surprised to see Hetzner so high in the ranking of small cloud providers. It seems they are not doing any marketing but that their products are offering a very good price/performance ratio and therefore attracts many customers.

Another provider that is suprising is Scaleway that has more downloads than Linode or OVH.

Concerning OVH, it’s a bit specific as for example their S3 bucket are compatible with AWS and users can download the AWS terraform provider to manage them. Also they can rely on the Openstack or VMware provider to manage other services.

HPE is emerging very strongly, it’s the first year that they have a terraform provider and they already rank just after Linode or Scaleway.

Chinese cloud providers, a very specific case

Alibaba and Tencent terraform provider seem very underrated compared to their “real” market share. To me, this means that Chinese DevOps don’t use Terraform, maybe they have a Chinese alternative? If some of you know about this I am curious to have your insights in comment :)

Thus, Alibaba has 3 million downloads and Tencent only 145k this year. It feels that Alibaba is being used by people outside of China which is less the case for Tencent.

Conclusion

This short analysis demonstrates well the supremacy of the Hyperscalers in the IasS market. AWS seems very far ahead, GCP and Azure seem closer to each other than I thought.

Aggregating the downloads of AWS, GCP and Azure, we are around 3 billion downloads over all time. Aggregating Oracle, Scaleway, DO, Linode, Hetzner, OVH, Ionos, HPE, Outscale, we are around 37 million downloads over all time. The gap is huge, nonetheless, I believe that it will shrink over time.

When selecting your cloud provider, don’t only look at its size There are many many other criteria such as price/performance ratio, services available, geographical presence, support, DevOps skills, carbon emissions…

Holori can help you make the right choice, just design your infra and find out which cloud provider can deliver and at which price !