Amazon Web Services – AWS, the public cloud pioneer with its first mover advantage is safely perched on top of the heap with 31% of the market share (this is for Q4 of 2015 for which numbers are publicly available). But going by the way Microsoft with its Azure is notching up numbers, the race between AWS and Microsoft Azure will be a two horse race in a year or two.
AWS, it seems is not sitting smug in its lead; in its bid to entice new customers and hold on the existing ones it has continually added newer services to already existing array of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) features. The recent example being AWS application discovery service which helps its users and system integrators with migration plan for applications. But interestingly AWS has dropped its prices to hold on to the lead raising fears of long term financial detriments.
Microsoft Azure in its quest to leverage its large base of on–premise technologies, is focusing on providing strong management and consistent user experience across platforms. This has rightly played into the enterprises interest to minimize vendors and systems thus creating loyal base of customers whom when fully converted may tip the race in its favor for Microsoft.
Another interesting facet of this race is the contrasting approaches of the competitors to cloud computing, while AWS relies on delivering value added services to its small and medium customers with emphasis on automation and scalability, Microsoft Azure is focusing on integration services between on premise technologies and its public cloud to leverage on its large enterprise customers.
These two leaders who have left the others players to grab the crabs are still to overcome certain challenges to safe –guard their leadership positions, AWS has to overcome the perception of its services being complex and pricing complicated. Microsoft Azure has to effectively counter the dearth of Azure cloud experts and perception that many of its features and functionalities are not ready to be used by very large customers.
For more on this read – The AWS vs. Azure race isn't over yet ( link -
http://fortune.com/2016/08/04/amazon-microsoft- cloud-race/)
Tags: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, AWS, Cloud Computing