Amazon Web Service’s IaaS cloud is big. Really big. Biggest in the market. In fact, it’s bigger than all of its other competitors’ clouds, by a lot.
+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Gartner shows a two-horse race in IaaS public cloud: AWS and Microsoft Azure +
In research firm Gartner’s recent Magic Quadrant not only did AWS come out on top in terms of its completeness of product offering and ability to executive, but lead researcher author and Gartner distinguished analyst Lydia Leong put into perspective AWS’s dramatic lead compared to its competitors.
AWS’s IaaS cloud is ten times larger than the next 14 competitors in the MQ combined!
AWS and Microsoft Azure are clearly the top two dogs in the public IaaS market. Microsoft has made significant strides in recent years to put itself in a competitive position with AWS. Those investments have resulted in impressive scale for Microsoft too. Leong and her colleagues estimate that Azure has more than twice as much IaaS capacity as everyone else in the report, other than AWS.
Figures like these reinforce the notion that the domestic IaaS cloud market is lead by two behemoths (AWS and Azure), and then there is everyone else.
Someone even bigger?!
There could be another vendor who has an even bigger cloud though. This vendor did not make it into the Magic Quadrant but it has the wherewithal to give AWS and Azure a run for its money. In a report titled “You thought Amazon’s cloud was big? Alibaba’s is huge” Bloomberg Businessweek reports that Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba’s IaaS cloud service claims 1.4 million customers. AWS has said it has 1 million globally.