Amazon Web Services (AWS) essentially invented large-scale public cloud infrastructure. Since that time they have continued to innovate and grow and have built a seemingly unassailable lead in the public cloud space where they are the generally accepted number one vendor. But in recent years AWS has had competitors emerging – while still a long distance from AWS’ product breadth and scale, these vendors are starting to deliver a compelling alternative. Most notable among them is
Given that fact it is interesting to see the relative differences between the vendors being articulated – the traditional analyst firms have started to invest time in developing these comparative analyses.
The interesting thing about Hilgendorf’s research is that he organized them according to buy-side criteria, sorting the different criteria into required, preferred and optional features for enterprise customers. This is important since much of the discussion around the various public cloud vendors to date has focused on the requirements of developers. While developers are indeed vitally important and the industry is awash with example of developer-led startups disrupting existing organizations, there is still a massive need for “enterprise-grade” services. Often the difference between enterprise-grade and developer focused has little to do with technical functionality and more to do with audit, control and governance features. Indeed, some areas of importance to enterprise that Hilgendorf detailed are seemingly minor – the ability to view service providers’ disaster recovery plans and the notice service providers give customers when changing their service-level agreements
Anyway, back to Hilgendorf’s research. The bottom line is that AWS has a sizable lead on Azure in the race, but Hilgendorf points out that this is going to play out over many years. It may be a long game, but enterprises are looking for some answers today, and the results a skewed strongly in AWS’ favor – AWS covers 92% of the featured that Gartner believes are required for enterprise use cases. In comparison, Azure only ticks 75% of the boxes. Across the eight different categories, AWS has more features than Azure in seven classes.
AWS leverages both scale and technology to dominate this research – its sheer scale is mind numbing (a subject that Amazon talked about at a recent analyst day and which I covered in this post), but it also matches ease of use (clear APIs and a self-service management dashboard) with this massive scale.
Somewhat counter-intuitively however, Hilgendorf concedes that there are some enterprises who will (and who should) chose Azure over AWS. For those enterprises that have an existing relationship with Microsoft, and significant investments across the Microsoft development stack, Azure may well be a more natural fit for them. Recent Gartner research suggests that 64% of users’ biggest reason for using Azure was their existing relationship with Microsoft.
It will be interesting to see Gartner apply this same comparison methodology against other providers – Google’s compute platform,
