back to article Amazon, Google, Microsoft: Who had the best year in cloud in 2019?

Three technology giants continued to dominate cloud computing in 2019, with each bringing in some interesting tools to play with as they sprawled over smaller players. The big picture did not change radically in 2019. All the big three cloud providers (or big four if you consider Alibaba’s growth in East Asia) continued to …

  1. Dinanziame Silver badge

    I remember the big three used to compete heavily against each other on price reductions, it's rather weird that they are still more expensive than other providers. Or maybe it's again a question of IaaS vs SaaS?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Looking at the articles, they are for ~$10/month and ~$100/month services and investigating what performance you get at those price points.

      Depending on your requirements, the scalability and reliability (assuming multiple availability zones are used) of some of these hosting options may not meet the requirements of all customers as "cloud" means very different things for different people ranging from a one-off server where cost is the only consideration, small environments where cost is a major factor but you still require significant performance through to large scale web farms or enterprise data centre hosting.

  2. hammarbtyp

    Wot, no Oracle? Larry won't be happy

  3. astounded1

    Most Cost Metrics Do Not Take In The Entire Cloud IT Expense Impact On Savings

    As a human, not an AI-driven humanoid, I wish it were not true that moving into an automated cloud setting for workloads, smart storage and data analytics proves to be overall less costly than going it alone in your DIY networks. However, it is cheaper if you manage things properly and know exactly what you need, as opposed to overdoing it.

    We have gone into several very large organizations and audited their software license costs, often finding 30 to 50 percent waste. In other words, the humans were holding onto turf in order to hold the line on their jobs. If you get subsequent buy-in from the C suite for a cloud migration (we specialize in Azure/365), when you take into account savings on wasteful over-subscriptions for Oracle, VMware, various security licenses, Dell/EMC massively overpriced products - and more - you can save a big organization quite a bit of cash.

    Unfortunately, a byproduct of this exercise is the loss of jobs at these operations, as they no longer need a small army of tech admins on prem.

    I'm afraid this situation will accelerate in 2020. Get some other training and expertise if your gig can be replaced by AI driven VMs that are running software that is self-learning. Because these clouds are spreading and they can't be stopped.

    After you figure in all the efficiencies from running only what is really required, onward to the lowering of the HR budget - cloud is usually substantially less costly than running big DIY environments.

    1. a_yank_lurker

      Re: Most Cost Metrics Do Not Take In The Entire Cloud IT Expense Impact On Savings

      DIY vs the Cloud is not always about bottom line costs. Another factor is the regulatory environment the company operates in and the data security regulations. Also, part of the on prem costs are overbuying licenses but the could be mitigated by more careful analysis of needs, e.g. do you really need Orifice from Slurp or would another option do the job or how many extra are needed for business growth. Do this exercise for all the major software used and there might be a pretty penny of savings lurking about.

      1. Boiled Gammon

        Re: Most Cost Metrics Do Not Take In The Entire Cloud IT Expense Impact On Savings

        Cobblers.

        I've not met a customer yet that can't improve their security stance and compliance by moving to a public cloud provider.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Most Cost Metrics Do Not Take In The Entire Cloud IT Expense Impact On Savings

          This is entirely true. Most industries are for the most part, heavily regulated and are sitting on big piles and stacks of legacy software. Those are not going anywhere anytime soon as there is no monetary and personal resources available to make the situation disappear by just waving a magic AI wand.

          Cloud computing is and will always be someone elses computer. Many made the mistake of forcing their companies into cloud vendors and are now stuck with less know how in their companies than ever before and vendor lockdown on top.

          1. Wonder Dog

            Re: Most Cost Metrics Do Not Take In The Entire Cloud IT Expense Impact On Savings

            I would argue that some of that "know how" is no longer of any value. You rarely need to be employing people whose core skill is the detailed knowledge of the features, functions and compatibility requirements of various chunks of server, storage and network hardware. Who really needs to care whether an HP server is " better" than a Dell or if EMC snapshots aren't quite as good as Netapp. It useless knowledge and not s something most business need to employ people for

            1. magicaces

              Re: Most Cost Metrics Do Not Take In The Entire Cloud IT Expense Impact On Savings

              Then companies will really need to accept they need to fully trust the know-how from the vendors and cloud providers and quite honestly having worked with some of these vendors on behalf of my previous company they can be very difficult in terms of their know-how, care for your business and ripping your company off.

              I think its very wise to keep some sort of internal IT management with the knowledge needed for your company because cloud scaling is the same as on-premise scaling you just aren't faced with the hardware directly.

            2. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Most Cost Metrics Do Not Take In The Entire Cloud IT Expense Impact On Savings

              The interesting thing about that analysis, Wonder Dog, is that is presupposes that "you can't teach an old dog new tricks". As comforting as it might be to the bean counters to assume the value of high-wage IT veterans has now been debased to the point where they can be easily discarded, in my experience that attitude isn't borne out by the facts. There are a lot of people with 20 or more years experience in IT who have become expert at adopting and adapting to new technologies and technology paradigms. They've also developed highly accurate B.S. detectors, which is probably as good a reason as any for some people outside (and sometimes inside) the enterprise to try to get them out of the way. No matter. There will always be some businesses out there who appreciate the disaster-avoidance skills of those who have the mileage to prove they've got what it takes to get the business to the next level.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What a ridiculous pie-chart in the article. AWS surely has the 76.2% share.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like