While the market for Microsoft cloud services is growing – fast – Amazon Web Services continues to be the unequivocal leader in infrastructure as a service (IaaS). For the sixth year in a row, Gartner named AWS a leader in its Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Worldwide. Unfortunately, the very thing that sets Amazon apart from its competitors is also the very thing that challenges organizations as they move workloads to the cloud.
Not only is AWS a cloud leader, but it sits far and above other cloud services providers. Microsoft Azure is its nearest neighbor and the only other provider in the leader quadrant. TechRepublic reports that “In 2014, Gartner discovered that AWS had 5X the utilized capacity of its next 14 nearest competitors combined. By 2015, that lead had jumped to 10X. While we’d expect to see an industry pioneer dominate the early days of that industry, AWS is unique in its ability to continue to overshadow its “peers” for years on end.”
This is due to a number of reasons. However, we think Amazon CFO Brian Olsavksy sums it up best. He says customers “choose AWS primarily for three factors: The functionality and pace of innovation that we bring to the table, our partner and customer ecosystem, and our experience.”
It’s that rapid pace of innovation that we find particularly exciting. According to Olsavsky, “[AWS] had 422 new significant services and features added in the first half of this year.” These services include functionality for data analytics, mobile, Internet of Things, machine learning and more. They also enable workloads to run more efficiently and cost effectively.
Of course, all this innovation doesn’t do a bit of good if customers don’t know how to use it. Unless you’re immersed in AWS day after day, it’s virtually impossible to keep up with the various services and features. That’s why our customers depend on us to continually improve their AWS workloads. We know their business and technical objectives, and actively help them make the most of the AWS cloud, applying new services and features where it makes sense. This ensures that they continue to optimize the cloud’s benefits of cost efficiency, flexibility and scalability.
Gartner named AWS as having both the furthest completeness of vision and the highest ability to execute, and we don’t expect that to change anytime soon. We’re proud to be both an Amazon Web Services Advanced Consulting Partner and an AWS Managed Service Partner. If you want to work with the cloud leader in IaaS, but you don’t know where to start – or your existing AWS workloads aren’t optimized for the existing services and capabilities – give us a call.