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Spending on cloud infrastructure services shot up by more than a third again as workload migration and cloud native applications development sped up, according to the latest research from Canalys.

After AWS filed its latest set of quarterly figures last night, analysts at the channel focused consultancy confirmed that some $47bn was forked out by biz customers on infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in calendar Q2, up 36 per cent year-on-year.

The top three cloud providers accounted for 61 per cent of this total expenditure, said Canalys, and AWS was the frontrunner with a 31 per cent share of the spoils, or $14.57bn.

On an earnings conference call last night, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said: "Disruptive economic events like COVID have cause many people to step back and think about how they want to change strategically. And many of come to the conclusion that they do not want to own and run their own datacenters."

Customer wins in the quarter for AWS include telcos Swisscom and Bell Canada, BMO Financial Group, Grupo Bancolumbia, and Ferrari.

Microsoft's Azure service grew 51 per cent to $10.34bn, giving it a 22 per cent share of total spending in IaaS. The beast of Redmond also flashed its financials this week, showing it made a $165m daily profit in fiscal '21.

Third-placed Google grabbed 8 per cent market share in the Canalys ranking, on the back of 61 per cent growth in sales to $3.76bn.

Google Cloud, which has a new EMEA boss in place to lead the charge following the exit of Chris Ciauri, also managed to clip its operating losses in the quarter to $591m versus an operating loss of $1.4bn a year earlier.

"Across cloud, we will continue to invest aggressively, given the opportunity we see," said CFO Ruth Porat this week in a calendar Q2 earnings call with Wall Street types. "The biggest cloud providers benefited from the dynamics of the lockdown, a trend that continues."

Canalys said the pandemic had exposed "many economic and operational fragilities" in the past year and a half, and organisations that worked on business resiliency planning had "expedited digital transformation projects and increased cloud consumption."

Many grey-haired hardware vendors are trying to counter the cloud generation of corporations by launching their own consumption-based services, including HPE, Dell, and Cisco.

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'$6 in every $10' spent on cloud infrastructure is with AWS, Microsoft, or Google - The Register