Amazon’s cloud is cleaner and impossible to surpass

Earlier this month, at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit in New York City, Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, explained why the AWS Cloud is pretty much impossible to surpass in the cloud computing market, despite competition from Microsoft, Google, IBM, Oracle, and many others.

According to a recent Gartner report, Amazon is more than 10 times bigger than the next largest 14 competitors combined, as measured by computing capacity, up from about five times big in 2014. AWS is regarded as the “safe choice” in the market and is the vendor most often chosen for strategic cloud adoption. Also, AWS is the only leader recommended for implementing enterprise applications and Gartner recommends it for “all use cases that run well in a virtualized environment,” including enterprise applications.

During the summit, Vogels also pointed out that Amazon is rolling out new features for its cloud at a blazing fast pace. In 2014, Amazon added 516 new features, nearly double the number of features it added in 2013. Basically, Amazon is improving its cloud much faster than its competitors, making it more than ever unmatchable.

 

The cloud is getting cleaner

At the same time, Amazon announced a few days ago that it’s building a wind farm to power future AWS data centers. The company announced last year that it would run all of its AWS data centers on renewable energy in the long term, and until now this is its biggest step toward that goal.

The new wind farm will be built in Perquimans and Pasquotank counties, North Carolina, and generate enough energy to power 61,000 homes. The 208 megawatt facility will be constructed and maintained by Iberdrola Renewables and will be the first utility-scale wind farm in North Carolina.

Altogether, Amazon’s current and planned renewable energy production will reach 1.3 million megawatt hours annually, enough to power 122,000 US homes.

However, even though we can all agree AWS is the market leader, most companies need at least to consider a multi-vendor cloud strategy when it comes to public infrastructure, so it’s also important to mention what other options are out there and what’s our safest bet outside the leader.

According to Gartner’s report, Microsoft and its Azure cloud computing platform is the only other company that proved its ability to execute near Amazon’s level. Of the other players, IBM, CSC, and Verizon have all slipped significantly.  There are other niche Enterprise level Cloud Companies that would make sense for multi-vendor cloud strategies, we will discuss pairing AWS with alternate vendors in the near future.

All in all the battle for supremacy at the moment is keeping AWS on top of the cloud! All we have to do is make sure we keep up the pace with this innovation. Don’t forget to share your thoughts in the comments.

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