Lessons from AWS Part III: Consumer Platform Drives Cloud Lead

There has been a lot of discussion, including Part I of this series, about Amazon’s relentless leverage of scale to drive down pricing in cloud services.  What is much less talked about is how its consumer platform drives its cloud leadership.  The reason why AWS will continue to lead the cloud services market, and IaaS, in particular, is the leverage it gains from its massive cloud consumer business.  Its extensive mesh network serves as an infrastructure kitchen in which AWS can test and consume its own resources on an unparalleled scale.

The scale of this infrastructure is only approached by two of its nearest contenders in cloud services.  Not coincidentally, both also have enormous cloud-based consumer driven businesses.  In Google’s case, search advertising, and in Microsoft’s, it is games.