A public cloud is one based on the standard cloud computing model, in which a

service provider makes resources, such as applications and storage, available to

the general public over the Internet. Public cloud services may be free or offered
on a pay-per-usage model.
It has become a daunting task for IT administrators to determine which, if any,
cloud provider is right for their enterprise.
When selecting a public cloud provider, various factors should therefore be taken
into consideration, including:

The nature of the providers platform

Accessibility from other devices and platforms
Built-in functionality
Individual or organisational needs
Cost
Amount of storage
Security

The main benefits of using a public cloud service are:

Easy and inexpensive set-up because hardware, application and bandwidth costs are
covered by the provider.
Scalability to meet needs.
No wasted resources because you pay for what you use.
The term "public cloud" arose to differentiate between the standard model and the
private cloud, which is a proprietary network or data center that uses cloud
computing technologies, such as virtualization. A private cloud is managed by the
organization it serves. A third model, the hybrid cloud, is maintained by both
internal and external providers.

Following are some popular public cloud computing providers:

1)Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a comprehensive, evolving cloud computing platform

provided by Amazon.com. Web services are sometimes called cloud services or remote
computing services. The first AWS offerings were launched in 2006 to provide online
services for websites and client-side applications.

To minimize the impact of outages and ensure robustness of the system, AWS is
geographically diversified into regions. These regions have central hubs in the
Eastern USA, Western USA (two locations), Brazil, Ireland, Singapore, Japan, and
Australia. Each region comprises multiple smaller geographic areas called
availability zones.

The growing AWS collection offers over three dozen diverse services including:

CloudDrive, which allows users to upload and access music, videos, documents, and
photos from Web-connected devices. The service also enables users to stream music
to their devices.
CloudSearch, a scalable search service typically used to integrate customized
search capabilities into other applications.
Dynamo Database (also known as DynamoDB or DDB), a fully-managed NoSQL database
service known for low latencies and scalability.
Elastic Compute Cloud, which allows business subscribers to run application
programs and can serve as a practically unlimited set of virtual machines (VMs).
ElastiCache, a fully managed caching service that is protocol-compliant with
Memcached, an open source, high-performance, distributed memory object caching
system for speeding up dynamic Web applications by alleviating database load.
Mechanical Turk, an application program interface (API) that allows developers to
integrate human intelligence into Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) using a network of
humans to perform tasks that computers are ill-suited for.
RedShift, a petabyte-scale data warehouse service designed for analytic workloads,
connecting to standard SQL-based clients and business intelligence tools.
Simple Storage Service (S3), a scalable, high-speed, low-cost service designed for
online backup and archiving of data and application programs.

2)Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure, formerly known as Windows Azure, is Microsoft's public cloud
computing platform. It provides a range of cloud services, including those for
compute, analytics, storage and networking. Users can pick and choose from these
services to develop and scale new applications, or run existing applications, in
the public cloud.

Microsoft Azure is widely considered both a Platform as a Service (PaaS) and

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering.

Microsoft categorizes Azure services into 11 main product types:

Compute these services provide virtual machines, containers, batch processing and
remote application access.
Web and mobile these services support the development and deployment of web and
mobile applications, and also offer features for API management, notification and
reporting.
Data storage this category includes Database as a Service offerings for SQL and
NoSQL, as well as unstructured and cached cloud storage.
Analytics these services provide distributed analytics and storage, as well as
real-time analytics, big data analytics, data lakes, machine learning and data
warehousing.
Networking this group includes virtual networks, dedicated connections and
gateways, as well as services for traffic management, load balancing and domain
name system (DNS) hosting.
Media and content delivery network (CDN) these services include on-demand
streaming, encoding and media playback and indexing.
Hybrid integration these are services for server backup, site recovery and
connecting private and public clouds.
Identity and access management (IAM) these offerings ensure only authorized users
can employ Azure services, and help protect encryption keys and other confidential
information.
Internet of Things (IoT) these services help users capture, monitor and analyze
IoT data from sensors and other devices.
Development these services help application developers share code, test
applications and track potential issues. Azure support a range of application
programming languages, including JavaScript, Python, .NET and Node.js.
Management and security these products help cloud administrators manage their
Azure deployment, schedule and run jobs, and create automation. This product group
also includes capabilities for identifying and responding to cloud security
threats.

3) IBM Cloud

IBM cloud computing is a set of cloud computing services for business offered by
the information technology company IBM. IBM cloud includes infrastructure as a
service (IaaS), software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS)
offered through public, private and hybrid cloud delivery models, in addition to
the components that make up those clouds.

IBM offers three hardware platforms for cloud computing.These platforms offer
built-in support for virtualization. For virtualization IBM offers IBM Websphere
application infrastructure solutions that support programming models and open
standards for virtualization.

The management layer of the IBM cloud framework includes IBM Tivoli
middleware.Management tools provide capabilities to regulate images with automated
provisioning and de-provisioning, monitor operations and meter usage while tracking
costs and allocating billing. The last layer of the framework provides integrated
workload tools. Workloads for cloud computing are services or instances of code
that can be executed to meet specific business needs. IBM offers tools for cloud
based collaboration, development and test, application development, analytics,
business-to-business integration, and security.

The IBM SmartCloud brand includes infrastructure as a service, software as a

service and platform as a service offered through public, private and hybrid cloud
delivery models. IBM places these offerings under three umbrellas: SmartCloud
Foundation, SmartCloud Services and SmartCloud Solutions.[14]

SmartCloud Foundation consists of the infrastructure, hardware, provisioning,

management, integration and security that serve as the underpinnings of a private
or hybrid cloud. Built using those foundational components, PaaS, IaaS and backup
services make up SmartCloud Services. Running on this cloud platform and
infrastructure, SmartCloud Solutions consist of a number of collaboration,
analytics and marketing SaaS applications.

IBM also builds cloud environments for clients that are not necessarily on the
SmartCloud Platform. For example, features of the SmartCloud platformsuch as
Tivoli management software or IBM Systems Director virtualizationcan be integrated
separately as part of a non-IBM cloud platform. The SmartCloud platform consists
solely of IBM hardware, software, services and practices.

4) Google Cloud Platform

Google Cloud Platform is a suite of public cloud computing services offered by

Google. The platform includes a range of hosted services for compute, storage and
application development that run on Google hardware. Google Cloud Platform services
can be accessed by software developers, cloud administrators and other enterprise
IT professionals over the public Internet or through a dedicated network
connection.

The core cloud computing services in the Google Cloud Platform include:

Google Compute Engine: An infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering that provides

users with virtual machine instances for workload hosting.
Google App Engine: A platform as a service (PaaS) offering that gives software
developers access to Google's scalable hosting. Developers can also use a software
developer kit (SDK) to develop software products that run on App Engine.
Google Cloud Storage: A cloud storage platform designed to store large,
unstructured data sets. Google also offers database storage options including Cloud
Datastore for NoSQL non-relational storage, Cloud SQL for MySQL fully-relational
storage and Google's native Cloud Bigtable database.
Google Container Engine: A management and orchestration system for Docker
containers that run within Google's public cloud. Google Container Engine is based
on the Google Kubernetes container orchestration engine.
Google Cloud Platform also includes cloud services for data processing and
analytics, such as Google BigQuery for SQL-like queries made against multi-terabyte
data sets. In addition, Google Cloud Dataflow is a data processing service intended
for analytics, extract transform and load (ETL) and real-time computational
projects. The platform also includes Google Cloud Dataproc, which offers Apache
Spark and Hadoop services for big data processing.

Google Cloud Platform also offers application development and integration services.
For example, Google Cloud Pub/Sub is a managed and real-time messaging service that
allows messages to be exchanged between applications. In addition, Google Cloud
Endpoints allows developers to create services based on RESTful APIs, and then make
those services accessible to Apple iOS, Android and JavaScript clients. Other
pfferings include Anycast DNS servers, direct network interconnections, load
balancing, monitoring and logging services.

The Google Cloud Platform suite of services is always evolving, and Google may
periodically introduce, change or discontinue services based on user demand or
competitive pressures. Google's main competitors in the public cloud computing
market include Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.