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Amazon and Microsoft Are Running One and Two in Two-Cloud Race (fortune.com)
When it comes to computing capacity for public cloud services, Amazon and Microsoft are dominating the pack. According to research firm Gartner, Google is the third in this cloud race. The conclusion comes as Gartner looks into Magic Quadrant's annual report surveys, which estimates the amount and type of cloud computing services offered for rent by big companies. Fortune reports: Amazon's continued strength will not surprise many considering the resources it has poured into this now-$10-plus billion a year business. AWS "has the largest share of compute capacity in use by paying customers -- many times the aggregate size of all other providers in the market," according to the report. Last year, Gartner's take was that AWS ran more than 10 times the cloud compute capacity as the next 14 cloud players combined. Asked whether that means Amazon's dominance has held steady, grown, or decreased year over year, Gartner managing vice president Rakesh Kumar told Fortune the research firm does not have the exact comparable figure, but that it is "reasonable to assume" that AWS has maintained the same lead this year. The odd man out here appears to be Google, which has been trying hard to win market share from the other two powers and to prove that it is serious about the public cloud market. Google remains the third largest player by Gartner's measures, but it has slipped a bit relative to the top two.
That is because people can't trust that Google won't drop their cloud services when they get bored of it and go after the next shiny thing. It has happened too many times.
oh yes microsoft on the other hand has stuff like zune and media center and silverlight and activex and internet explorer which all got dropped when microsoft got bored with supporting them
We have tried both Azure and AWS, with the same web app running on them at the same time.
We tried several different versions of our web app, and using both a vm in their cloud and their "app services".
MS had a more intuitive and easier to use interface, easier to do inital setup.
AWS interface has a much higher learning curve, with more spots to get hung up on.
But AWS was more reliable and seemed to have less issues.
Regarding support, MS was atrocious(but you already knew that).
AWS broke something on their back end, then didn't fix it, then they did fix it when we "alerted" them to the issue.
I'm not a fan of either company but I would say AWS is the better way to go here.
Just like with their foothold in the enterprise for Office 365 via existing customer base using Active Directory and Exchange, I assume many of their Azure customers they got the same way, whereas AWS didn't have that advantage.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
The difference is that MS always lays out a clear support horizon. If anything MS is the opposite of Google in that regard. MS tends to support things long after they should.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
If you compare any of the APIs from Google, Microsoft and Amazon, you will clearly see why the different groups are in the place they are.
Google's API set is probably one of the crappiest I've ever seen. It's impossible to do anything with their service unless you use their pre-baked SDK. Sure, it's a REST api, but you can't authenticate against it, because they won't really tell you how -- only why you wouldn't want to do it. They have no docs on how to use their APIs with just CURL.
Microsoft's is better. Their APIs are a pain (mostly because they keep changing), but at least they are pretty well documented and done in a way that you can actually use if you want to. They offer a really rich set of features.... but they do keep changing them on the fly and don't really version stuff like you would expect.
Amazon knows how to API enable their stuff. Their own services and tools use their own published API to do things. They give lots of examples in a bunch of different languages. If you write against it, it will pretty much work forever unless you change your own setup.