Lessons From AWS Part I: The Crush Of The Boa Constrictor

The cloud industry is often portrayed as a race between Amazon’s AWS, Google’s Compute Engine and Microsoft’s Windows Azure.  The reality however, at least to date, is more like AWS and the also-rans.  The lesson is scale and the classroom is Walmart.

For all the recent announcements out of Google and Microsoft, both still come up short of AWS in terms of available features and ecosystem.  In fact, AWS not only offers products that match all of the most recent features that became generally available from its two competitors, it surpasses them by a significant margin.  Moreover, while Google and Microsoft have some third-party companies that provide additional services on top of their cloud, neither is a match for the sprawling third-party ecosystem surrounding AWS.