Cloud Computing: Azure is Speedy but AWS is More ‘Enterprise-Complete’ and Continues to Dominate the Market

How do the major cloud computing infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) vendors stack up? Recent reports show, unsurprisingly, that Amazon’s AWS is the clear leader. Synergy Research reports that in Q2 2013 that Amazon AWS market share was more than 28 percent. The entire cloud infrastructure market saw 47 percent annual growth with Amazon AWS growing by 52 percent. Microsoft, Google and IBM together account for less than two-thirds the size of the AWS business.

John Dinsdale, Synergy Research Group VP and General Manager, said that “starting from a much smaller base, the big three IT companies actually achieved higher growth rates, but Amazon is doing an impressive job of keeping its grip on market leadership and remains in a league of its own. The real race is to see if any of the chasing pack can establish themselves as a clear number two in the IaaS/PaaS market. While IBM’s acquisition of SoftLayer helped it to leapfrog both Microsoft and Google, the three remain tightly bunched with somewhat similar growth trajectories.”

But a parallel study on cloud vendor price and performance by Cloud Spectator puts things in a totally different perspective for ranking the cloud vendors. The report grades the performance of the five major cloud computing vendors with cloud infrastructure offerings: Rackspace, HP Cloud, Softlayer, Amazon EC2 and Windows Azure.

Cloud Spectator found that “with a lack of standardization in the IaaS industry, providers freely use unique terminology to describe their VM resource allocations. How do you compare an ECU to an HPCCU to a vCPU?… On average, the highest-performance provider over the test period is Windows Azure, and the lowest performance provider is Amazon EC2. The difference in performance: Windows Azure scores 3 times higher than Amazon EC2 on average.”

The Cloud Spectator study makes you think that Windows Azure is worth a look, but a report by Gartner gives Microsoft a black eye. To be fair, Gartner concludes that no cloud vendor today is really yet up to snuff. On a scale that ranks the percentage of acceptable fit with enterprise requirements, Gartner gives Rackspace a score of 53 percent, Windows Azure came in with 55 percent, and Amazon AWS ranked highest at 71 percent. Gartner notes that areas where all cloud services are weak include: global load balancing, lack of cloud-to-cloud replication services, and lack of transparency over recovery processes.

The Gartner report notes that AWS is improving rapidly and they expect AWS to reach a score of 100 percent by mid 2015. The report said that “AWS defines innovation and feature sets that many competitors aim to incorporate into road maps and offerings months and years in the future.”