Public cloud: strengths and weaknesses of the three biggest beasts

With the increase in remote working, business can't get enough of the cloud. We share users' opinions of AWS, Azure and GCP

The big cloud service providers have had an excellent pandemic. While other businesses struggle Covid has proved that there's nothing like being in the right space at the right time.

The sudden and urgent requirement for mass remote working has forced the hand of many a cautious executive. Out went the lingering concerns over data security, shadow IT, control and vendor lock-in as everyone rushed for the connectivity and reach that only cloud can provide. And it's extremely unlikely they'll go back again once the pandemic is over.

Amongst the old guard, Microsoft reported cloud revenues of $51 billion for the 12 months to June 30, representing an uptick of 30 per cent over the year. IBM reported a similar rate of growth and Amazon says it's cloud is also expanding at around 30 per cent a year. Oh, and Jeff Bezos became the world's first $200 billion man.

And the newer breed are reporting even faster growth, Alibaba at 69 per cent and Google at 43 per cent.

Like-for-like size and growth-rate breakdowns between cloud vendors are like comparing apples and oranges, but there's no doubt that the overall fruit pile continues to grow apace, and Covid has done it no harm at all. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Base 195 IT leaders; Other: HR, DevOps, AI/ML, Storage, OSs, BI, Visualisation, Security hardware, IoT, Office software.

A recent study by LogicMonitor found that almost 9 out of 10 IT leaders believe the pandemic will accelerate cloud adoption - which to be honest will surprise pretty much no-one.

We asked 195 senior IT leaders what their spending plans are over the next three months and ‘Cloud IaaS/PaaS' came top of the list. Connectivity, video conferencing and business continuity - all arguably pandemic-related topics - are also being prioritised.

The big three

The figure above gives shows the public cloud providers with which our respondents have experience, either through production use or as part of an evaluation process.

Sixty-five per cent said they have experience with Microsoft Azure and 48 per cent with AWS. Interestingly, the numbers for the top two CSPs are exactly the same as the last time we ran the poll in August 2019, and it's always interesting to see Azure ahead of AWS, since Amazon's cloud is the larger of the two by almost every measure.

Third is Google Cloud Platform at 17 per cent, up from 12 per cent last year and the only real riser.

The other fast-growing cloud, Alibaba, is nowhere to be seen. That's because almost all of its take-up is in Asia, and given the political climate it seems likely to stay that way for some time.

So let's take a look at the top three, where they've come from, where they're going and what our respondents like and dislike about their services.

AWS

The first to market, the largest and generally the quickest to release new services AWS is still the one to beat, according to many industry watchers. Users praised its uptime and availability, they eulogised its third-party ecosystem, spoke highly of its scalability and even had something good to say about pricing - in this case the relative simplicity of its charging structures.

But of course, that couldn't last. The majority of complaints we heard about AWS were to do with the cost of data egress. That and the fact that you get charged for each and every extra. "Be less RyanAir" pleaded one respondent.

Others opined that AWS's services are rather vanilla, and that the company lacked specific expertise in their sector.

Overall though, the mood music was upbeat. One IT leader summed up Amazon's cloud thus: "No-one ever got fired for buying AWS".

They used to say that about IBM of course.

Azure

And so to Azure, which had some fans in the education and health sectors who said Microsoft came to them with an offer they really couldn't refuse in terms of pricing and service. Respondents from other sectors also commended the firm's sector-specific support - not something you find with AWS. They liked the FastTrack onboarding service, and found Active Directory very handy for managing authorisation and authentication.

But some complained that Azure is overly complex, with an opaque pricing structure that takes no account of the actual rate of use of the service. Prices that seem reasonable initially can climb unexpectedly when thresholds are crossed and end up being much higher than expected.

But given Microsoft's enterprise footprint, Azure is perhaps the cloud with most clout. One respondent summed it up as: "They have understood the need to be as innovative as AWS and are constantly improving".

GCP

It's hard to picture a behemoth like Google as a challenger business, but in this field that's exactly what it is. Like most newcomers, GCP is concentrating on niches that it can make its own.

"[They're] listening to customers, specialising in particular areas AWS did not take on," said one respondent. Others praised GCP's uptime and support and the relative lack of vendor lock-in, as evidenced by low data egress prices.

But the price of specialisation is breadth, and those looking for a wide range of enterprise services might be disappointed in Google's cloud. Legacy integration is not great said one IT leader, while others complained that support, while competent, could be slow. There was thought to be a lack of clarity in Google's cloud roadmap.

To sum up: Google is seen as "a leader in AI and Kubernetes" said one respondent.

This research, first presented at Computing 's Deskflix Cloud & Infrastructure event, is part of a regular series of updates to our Computing Delta market intelligence service.

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