The public cloud revolution initiated by Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2002 has transformed IT service deployment and delivery, leading to a significant growth in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market, which was valued at $41.4 billion in 2019 and projected to reach $81.5 billion by 2022. The market is dominated by AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, with IBM, Oracle, and Alibaba Cloud serving niche areas. While the major providers offer similar IaaS products, the choice of provider often hinges on organizational needs, geographic requirements, and the desire to avoid vendor lock-in through a multicloud strategy, as evidenced by 84% of respondents in the Rightscale 2019 State of the Cloud Report employing such a strategy. The blog post outlines fifteen guidelines for evaluating cloud service providers, emphasizing considerations like compute instance sizing, operating system support, geographic location, pricing, availability SLAs, data storage and security, database services, big data analytics, hybrid storage, and application support, including DevOps tools, modern app frameworks, monitoring, IoT, and AI-based services. It underscores the need for organizations to clarify their specific use cases and requirements when choosing a cloud provider, also noting the importance of considering the provider's network of partners to enhance offerings.