To the surprise of no one, Amazon Web Services (AWS) remained the largest cloud provider during the first three months of this year, maintaining the same basic market share of an overall growing space. And also not a surprise, the market's big three – AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud – continue to extend their dominance.

Both Synergy Research Group (SRG) and Canalys pegged AWS with 33% of the cloud infrastructure services market, a share it also held at the end of 2021. Sure, stagnation is often linked to death – though usually in a more colloquial manner – that 33% is now from a market of between $53 billion (SRG numbers) and $56 billion (Canalys numbers), an increase from the $50-ish billion at the end of last year. (Yay math!)

Microsoft remained the market’s No. 2 player, with SRG’s numbers giving Azure 22% of the market and Canalys’ numbers equating 21% market share. While still runner-up, Microsoft did manage to take a bit more overall market share than AWS both sequentially and year over year.

Google Cloud’s numbers also varied between firms, with SRG labeling the No. 3 cloud provider with 10% of the market and Canalys mapping Google Cloud out at 8% of the market. Canalys did add the kicker that “Google Cloud was the fastest growing of the top three, increasing by 54% in the latest quarter.”

The biggest takeaway from the reports was that the big three continue to extend their market dominance.

Canalys reported that the three accounted for 62% of the market at the end of Q1 this year compared to 58% a year ago. “The top three cloud service providers have benefited from increased adoption and scale, collectively growing 42% year on year,” the firm wrote.

SRG Chief Analyst John Dinsdale tackled that dominance from the other angle: “As Amazon, Microsoft, and Google continue to grow at 35-50% per year, other non-Chinese cloud providers are typically growing in the 10-20% range. That can still be an attractive proposition for those smaller providers as long as they focus on regional or service niches where they can differentiate themselves from the big three.”