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I was in Google Cloud's partner org for >7 years, managing a team of solution architects pointed at our most strategic partners (Accenture, Deloitte, Infosys, H

I was in Google Cloud's partner org for >7 years, managing a team of solution architects pointed at our most strategic partners (Accenture, Deloitte, Infosys, HCL, TCS, etc). I have been saying for nearly the entirety of the time that the way things will pan out for hyperscalers is going to roughly look like this: AWS = the bazaar of public clouds. A service for nearly everything, but WYSIWYG and quality & consistency will be all over the place, just like amazon.com has become. Azure = will ultimately own the enterprise. Microsoft is the new IBM and their mature GTM and Professional Services organizations will carry increasing value as cloud services become mostly commoditized. Microsoft has multiple large revenue streams to fund disruptive acquisitions and these will bear fruit through good management. Satya is proving to be an exceptional CEO. GCP = an also-ran on compute/network/storage, but potentially differentiated on data, analytics & AI if leadership can organize the troops and keep focus on things that matter. Still very rough on the GTM side, and late to the party, making enterprise sales that much harder. Has some unique strengths, but can't rest on its laurels. Execution and focus are key. Oracle = Making a killing selling an easy-button-to-cloud to existing Oracle on-prem customers, and frankly, this is plenty to keep things moving forward for a while. IBM = Lots of hopes & dreams associated with RedHat acquisition and GBS/GTS split. It's still a bit early to tell how things will pan out, but IBM isn't playing the same sport as the rest, and has a lot more in common with Oracle than the big three. My prediction for the next couple of years is that AWS continues to lose market share due to QoS and ultimately being spread too thin (and alienating partners), and all the rest capture it. MSFT is the biggest winner, Google will eventually find a sweet spot (it's already in the "too big to fail" category, and will achieve profitability this year), and ORCL/IBM will see increasing success in their niches but largely avoid direct competition/comparison with the others.

nextworddev 4y ago
People underestimate AWS but as long as their S3, EC2, SQS, and Lambda keeps kicking butt, it'd be really hard to displace them. All roads ultimate lead to storage and compute, which I think AWS does a really good job in.
- danpalmer 4y ago
  Are these all kicking butt? S3 is great, and I don't know much about SQS... But EC2? Configurations are static, cost optimisation is hard, the spot market is a pain, reserved instances aren't fun to trade-off. Compared to GCP where you get sustained usage discounts which are much simpler to reason about, and you can spec machines in much more dynamic ways. And Lambda? It's just not a great environment to build applications for. Frameworks are necessary to tame complexity, API gateway adds a ton more complexity, dealing with any state is difficult. Lambda doesn't seem any better than any of the other FaaS offerings. Fargate seems like a better option for most people who want to use serverless, but again that's not unique.
  - nextworddev 4y ago
    As for Lambda, if ur app gets less than a million requests it’s basically free, which I love. API gateway lets me sleep at night because of all it’s security features. EC2 is kind of crappy UX wise but spot instances at cheap af
  - acdha 4y ago
    AWS compute savings plans are easy to reason about, though, and cover things like Lambda and Fargate, too. GCP’s sustained usage discounts are nice but they don’t save more than AWS’ savings offer and in the last 6 months that’s been a lot lower than GCP’s cost increases on other services.
    - danpalmer 4y ago
      I don't think they are easy to reason about. They're non-trivial to explain, and to figure out how to make best use of them requires quite a lot of modelling, usage projection, etc, to figure out how many of each type to buy. The lowest priced options also require pre-purchasing, which ties up cash. They're rarely worth it for a business with typical cash flow. From a cash flow perspective "it just gets cheaper after 3 months" is very straightforward, requires no usage projection, and not a lot of modelling to figure out eventual prices. The fact that it's not opt-in also means that more businesses will get the benefits, so many don't use the reserved instances because they don't have the capacity to figure out how best to use them, or worry about giving up the flexibility.
ctvo 4y ago
> AWS = the bazaar of public clouds. A service for nearly everything, but WYSIWYG and quality & consistency will be all over the place > My prediction for the next couple of years is that AWS continues to lose market share due to QoS and ultimately being spread too thin (and alienating partners), and all the rest capture it. Need data points. I've used AWS, GCP, and Azure. AWS is still the only cloud I'd use for business critical infrastructure. There hasn't been a drop off in the quality. I'll take AWS compute (EC2, ECS) over anything at Azure and GCP. Warts and all.
primax 4y ago
> Azure = will ultimately own the enterprise. Microsoft is the new IBM and their mature GTM and Professional Services organizations will carry increasing value as cloud services become mostly commoditized. Microsoft has multiple large revenue streams to fund disruptive acquisitions and these will bear fruit through good management. Satya is proving to be an exceptional CEO. Given AWS is still growing at 40%+ a year on their huge base, vs Azure who have struggled to hit 30% on a much smaller base... I'd expect the opposite to happen here. Microsoft will end up as the home for companies who 'buy' tech, and Amazon for the companies who 'build' tech.
- finikytou 4y ago
  not only that azure puts as cloud $ everything including the windows xp wallpaper.

nextworddev 4y ago

People underestimate AWS but as long as their S3, EC2, SQS, and Lambda keeps kicking butt, it'd be really hard to displace them. All roads ultimate lead to storage and compute, which I think AWS does a really good job in.

danpalmer 4y ago
Are these all kicking butt? S3 is great, and I don't know much about SQS... But EC2? Configurations are static, cost optimisation is hard, the spot market is a pain, reserved instances aren't fun to trade-off. Compared to GCP where you get sustained usage discounts which are much simpler to reason about, and you can spec machines in much more dynamic ways. And Lambda? It's just not a great environment to build applications for. Frameworks are necessary to tame complexity, API gateway adds a ton more complexity, dealing with any state is difficult. Lambda doesn't seem any better than any of the other FaaS offerings. Fargate seems like a better option for most people who want to use serverless, but again that's not unique.
- nextworddev 4y ago
  As for Lambda, if ur app gets less than a million requests it’s basically free, which I love. API gateway lets me sleep at night because of all it’s security features. EC2 is kind of crappy UX wise but spot instances at cheap af
- acdha 4y ago
  AWS compute savings plans are easy to reason about, though, and cover things like Lambda and Fargate, too. GCP’s sustained usage discounts are nice but they don’t save more than AWS’ savings offer and in the last 6 months that’s been a lot lower than GCP’s cost increases on other services.
  - danpalmer 4y ago
    I don't think they are easy to reason about. They're non-trivial to explain, and to figure out how to make best use of them requires quite a lot of modelling, usage projection, etc, to figure out how many of each type to buy. The lowest priced options also require pre-purchasing, which ties up cash. They're rarely worth it for a business with typical cash flow. From a cash flow perspective "it just gets cheaper after 3 months" is very straightforward, requires no usage projection, and not a lot of modelling to figure out eventual prices. The fact that it's not opt-in also means that more businesses will get the benefits, so many don't use the reserved instances because they don't have the capacity to figure out how best to use them, or worry about giving up the flexibility.

ctvo 4y ago

> AWS = the bazaar of public clouds. A service for nearly everything, but WYSIWYG and quality & consistency will be all over the place > My prediction for the next couple of years is that AWS continues to lose market share due to QoS and ultimately being spread too thin (and alienating partners), and all the rest capture it. Need data points. I've used AWS, GCP, and Azure. AWS is still the only cloud I'd use for business critical infrastructure. There hasn't been a drop off in the quality. I'll take AWS compute (EC2, ECS) over anything at Azure and GCP. Warts and all.

primax 4y ago

> Azure = will ultimately own the enterprise. Microsoft is the new IBM and their mature GTM and Professional Services organizations will carry increasing value as cloud services become mostly commoditized. Microsoft has multiple large revenue streams to fund disruptive acquisitions and these will bear fruit through good management. Satya is proving to be an exceptional CEO. Given AWS is still growing at 40%+ a year on their huge base, vs Azure who have struggled to hit 30% on a much smaller base... I'd expect the opposite to happen here. Microsoft will end up as the home for companies who 'buy' tech, and Amazon for the companies who 'build' tech.

finikytou 4y ago
not only that azure puts as cloud $ everything including the windows xp wallpaper.