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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.
Google didn't pay for a study. I've always been fascinated by the "Magic Quadrants" since the time I was doing some research on firewalls and found 3 of them from the same year, all offering different best options.
AWS sucks because it's impossible to know what you need to buy and how much you're going to get billed.
They keep splitting their services up into different categories and changing the names to boot.
Yeah, you can get shit up and running on AWS. No, you won't have a damned clue how much it'll cost until you get the bill.
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
I've heard of AWS and Azure, but to be honest I didn't even know Google had a cloud platform. I still don't even know what it is called. I could probably google that.
I predict cloudness is mostly fad for bigger co's because our current OS's, conventions, and management techniques haven't caught up to the virtualization possibilities that networking offers. Cloud vendors are ahead of the curve because that's their direct goal and job. But the lessons will trickle out to general IT.
When they catch up, orgs will choose to keep most of their hardware on premises for security and a desire to not depend on the financial viability of a cloud vendor.
The OS and/or app design will have to be more divorced from hardware design so that servers or server farm units are easier for internal stuff to swap in and out as needed.
If a server or component of the "internal cloud" gets sick, an app stack could automatically switch to a different hardware unit and/or its spare or replication partner. A new off-the-shelf "cloud box" could then be casually plugged in as needed.
I see no reason why an in-house cloud farm couldn't be ran almost as cheep as a warehouse-style cloud could if the cloud boxes are almost plug-and-play. Servicing 30 plug-and-play box farms shouldn't be significantly more expensive than servicing 30,000. It's only like that now because the app stack has to match the hardware in most current shops.
Small companies are probably still more likely to use external clouds because they don't want to hire server hardware staff, electricians, etc. to build and run on-premises cloud rooms.
Table-ized A.I.
As a system architect who works daily with both AWS and Azure for a living i am not surprised at all.
The quality and features of AWS is unmatched by any other cloud provider out there.
And anyone wishing to compete with AWS has a long journey ahead of them.
Nevertheless we set up our business to be cross-cloud so we can deploy the applications in any cloud we desire.
I think we currently spend around $20000 on AWS fees, $1000 on Azure and $3000 on an Openstack provider in our country itself.
Currently we are looking into Google cloud support as well. Our initial research showed that it has all the features we rely on like Virtual Private Networks between VMs, Floating IPs, Volumes, etc and a lower price point compared to AWS so we believe this might prove to be an interesting option for some of our customers who desire cheaper solutions while still wanting the flexibility of the cloud.
My prediction for this and next year is that we will continue to add many more customers to AWS. Azure will probably remain stable and Google Cloud will have a couple of pilot projects running.