Google’s ongoing attempt to steal away market share from larger cloud rivals Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure has forced the company to try different business models that take into account its challenger position. This was seen in the recent expansion of Google's Anthos platform that is initially targeting Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Anthos is Google's fully managed Kubernetes-based platform that allows users to manage their data and applications in an on-premises environment or across cloud platforms from rivals like AWS and Microsoft. It was initially announced at Google’s Cloud Next event in 2018 — when it was labeled Cloud Services Platform — and formally launched at last year’s event.

Google earlier this year expanded the reach of Anthos into those competing clouds with an initial multi-cloud push into Amazon Web Services (AWS). Jennifer Lin, VP of product management at Google, at that time said that the company plans to tap into Microsoft Azure later this year.

In going after AWS first, Google went after a rival with the largest market share. However, Lin also explained that AWS has a similar operational model to Google.

“We really feel like the pattern is very similar,” Lin said. “We are still at the early days where most people are using, especially AWS, as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). So AWS was kind of always rented compute.”

For contrast, Lin noted that Microsoft is different “because they came from non-cloud.”

“Microsoft came from System Center, which became Azure Stack, and Office 365, which was a [software-as-a-service] version of Exchange and Office,” Lin said. “They came from a perpetual license, on-prem distribution, not from scale-out elastic cloud resources. So there is a lot more proprietary history with Microsoft than AWS.”

Lin also noted that this has led to strategic differences between the two. “Microsoft, they’re sort of giving away the renewals for their legacy products in order to get more uptake on their cloud,” she explained.

Google’s cloud push remains a work in progress. The company did report a 52% year-over-year increase in cloud revenues for its most recent quarter.

However, that revenue continues to pale in comparison to its larger rivals. Microsoft posted a more robust 62% year-over-year surge in its Azure revenues for the latest quarter, while AWS’ reported a more modest 33% increase, though on a substantially larger starting number.

Those two also controlled half of the first-quarter cloud market, according to Synergy Research Group, with AWS at 32% market share and Microsoft at 18% market share. Google remains a distant No. 3 with around 8% market share.

Lin did note that Google continues to be aggressive in the space both to continue the company’s push to gain on the market leaders and because of its technological history. She specifically cited the increased use of Kubernetes as an infrastructure layer to host cross-cloud management by all of the cloud providers, which is a space where Google has the most history.

“We've been at it for almost six years now and it's based on 15 years of investing in this type of architectural model,” Lin said, referencing Google’s initial work with its Borg platform that was the initial basis for Kubernetes.

Google is also remaining active in striking deals with other large players in the cloud space.

It recently signed an agreement with VMware to make it easier to migrate and run VMware workloads on Google Cloud. The move allowed Google to join AWS, Microsoft, and IBM Cloud, which already had established similar ties with VMware. Google also struck a storage deal with Dell Technologies Cloud, and is reportedly looking to acquire cloud-native software company D2iQ, which was formerly known as Mesosphere.