AWS leads UK cloud market while Microsoft dominates growth and new customers

Microsoft is achieving the highest margins while at the same time achieving the strongest growth in the UK cloud market, according to a working paper from the competition watchdog. In October last year, the country's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) confirmed it would investigate the big cloud services players and their …

[Doctor Syntax]

"Participants say that these enterprise agreements and the relationships they symbolize mean they are very unlikely to consider switching from [Microsoft's cloud] Azure, but they do not see them as directly inhibiting switching – just that the status quo would make switching an illogical business decision, given the benefits these agreements provide and the effort required to disentangle their infrastructure from the Microsoft ecosystem,"

That seems analogous to what any drug addict would say about their poison of choice.

Do any of their customers cite the risk of price-hikes by third parties and the cost of extrication in their annual reports? Surely they ought to.

[Anonymous Coward]

Do any of their customers cite the risk of price-hikes by third parties and the cost of extrication in their annual reports?

Whenever I talk to cloud architects half of their time seems to be spent using cost calculators on their cloud of choice to try and figure out how much their set up will cost. They usually end up with a number that's different to what they actually end up being charged.

In the good old days of using dedicated hardware it was generally on a fixed - or at least known in advanced - pricing basis. One of the "benefits" of the cloud was touted that you could significantly reduce that cost on the basis you might not be using anywhere near the capacity you were paying for with dedicated hardware. The reality is somewhat different. It simply moves a known and fixed cost to a variable one.

From one of the linked articles (https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/13/microsoft_ends_azure_egress_fees/)

"We support customer choice, including the choice to migrate your data away from Azure," ... "Azure now offers free egress for customers leaving Azure when taking their data out of the Azure infrastructure via the internet to switch to another cloud provider or an on-premises data center."

Except it's not free. Another myth of the cloud was that you could easily take any containerized application and deploy it on any infrastructure with minimal work. The clue in the above statement is you can migrate your data. But you cannot migrate, for instance, all of the network/configuration within that providers infrastructure. At least not in any meaningful way that would require zero intervention from human beings. Which let's be honest is not free!

[doublelayer]

"Do any of their customers cite the risk of price-hikes by third parties and the cost of extrication in their annual reports? Surely they ought to."

Whether they aught to is one thing, but I can virtually guarantee that they don't for the same reason that they don't report the extrication from anything else: they don't know it until they need to. How costly would it be to, for example, get rid of VMWare products following the licensing and price changes? It's not a simple calculation because you have to know what you're switching to to know the license costs and you have to estimate the work required, but the IT department is kind of busy doing work they know they need to do.

Now do the same calculation for every other heavily-used piece of technology. What would it cost to change out Red Hat if IBM chose to do something intolerable to it? That's a long research plan for something that's speculative at best, but could be pretty cheap or extremely expensive depending on how much you rely on it and if you can change to something similar or not. In some situations, the likelihood of wanting or needing to change is high enough that you would calculate that cost in preparation, but doing it routinely is not an easy or cheap process, whether you're talking about a cloud provider or any other piece of technology.

[MatthewSt]

Spelling, grammar and facts...

... All seem to take a hike at various points during the article.

"while Microsoft saw its share rise from to 30 and 40 percent"

"new business winsm"

And the bit about them dropping egress fees probably wants to make it a little clearer that you need to be leaving to take advantage of that.