AWS under pressure as big three battle to eat the cloud market The big three cloud companies are all growing thanks to an expanding market, but Amazon is under increasing pressure from Microsoft and Google, while newcomers are on the rise. Synergy Research has published data showing market share by spend in global cloud infrastructure services over the last twenty quarters. According to …
We've had at least 2 serious incidents this year for AWS and Microsoft respectively.
Where despite claims their infrastructure was resilient to a single point of failure type of incident, pretty much that happened.
We don't need a fourth cloud player. We need to stop and take a serious look at how reliant we're becoming on shovelling everything on to it and then moaning when it goes wrong.
It has become increasingly clear, year by year, that Amazon has NEVER had the right people in the room to design for resilience. Their contract says "best effort", and that's all anyone can get. "If it's not broke, don't fix it." When it inevitably DOES break, scramble to get it working, and then take the most obvious steps to prevent a repeat, but never bother to think about the class of failures represented by this case and prevent THOSE.
On the security side, they clearly are (or were) trying to do the right thing, but again, are comically inadequate.
Microsoft is simply genetically incapable of producing a high-quality product. Read one of their post-mortems. If you've learned SRE at Google, you'll want to be sitting down with a stiff drink.
Not that Google is in practice better. Their policy of deleting accounts without recourse with YouTube & GMail seems to have snuk into GCP, so you can't really use it for anything business critical without some very serious SRE on your end.
As for Oracle, their corporate arrogance means that their system is likely as bad as Azure, it's just too small to notice. (I've some first-hand knowledge.)
I've 0 exposure to the IBM cloud, but it would take a lot to convince me that it's being built & maintained by first-rate engineers & not some offshored devops monkeys.
Salesforce? Don't make me laugh. They cannot document their on-prem offerings, and don't offer the control needed to do serious work.
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All of which is NOT so say that the cloud is never the right answer. For a lot of startups, is certainly is. But the business risk is a lot higher than you might expect, and so you're going to need to bring in a real SWE with ops knowledge (the Google idea of SRE) fairly early on.
We do need plenty of players. The more, the less likely the world will be held to ransom by one or stopped by one's failure. Unfortunately, distributed resilience from failure & politics requires a better spread across countries, which isn't happening. I don't mean datacenter locations I mean the companies unable to be controlled by one nation. Despite protestations otherwise, if Trump or deep state told Amazon, Microsoft and Google CEOs to shutdown a country under threat, they would do it. One hopes the US doesn't go there having already undermined their currency & therefore power by using it as a weapon, one hopes lessons will be learnt and they wont do the same with cloud.
AC because my employer fancies itself "the 4th cloud provider" despite all sales records to the contrary. I for one am pretty surprised that we haven't seen such a provider coming out of Asia or Europe; Australia / NZ even if for no other reason than this. If the dominant tech firms are all based in a country where they must bow to the whims of a menally unstable autocrat, that seems like a pretty insecure future, no?
Wonder why the performance of MS Azure is so cyclical.
Do CFOs go screaming when they get their quarterly AWS bill, demand everything switch to Azure, they see their bill is just as bad plus the cost of having to hire qualified people for the migration (rather than low cost off-shore and grads with Stackoverflow, and now ChatGPT), and back they go?
With their attention spans and memory only lasting for a Wall Street quarter, I can see why that repeats
Amazon never had annual sales of physical product. Microsoft sales are so engrained with “get it over the line by June” that the pattern continued. Microsoft also aren’t reporting usage, they’re reporting billing which often includes bundles of credit.
Anon because I know this having lived it
Some governments are looking to cloud solutions that do not depend on an US based provider - for good reasons.
So there may be some providers not listed here that may get (some) market share, although it will not be too significant on a world wide top 3 scale - but significant enough to be noted.
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