Amazon Web Services is, by all accounts, the largest cloud service provider by far, although good luck finding third-party numbers to verify that. Amazon, like most of the big cloud providers, doesn’t disclose much about current or planned data centers.
According to CloudHarmony, new research from Accenture analyst Huan Liu estimates that Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) scored a 365-day availability of 99.9974% and runs on a whopping 450,000 servers. Amazon does not break out AWS revenue, but some say it could already be a billion dollar business.
And this appears to be a small difference; however the downtime in hours paints another picture. Azure Virtual Machines was down for 42.94 hours, whereas EC2 was unavailable for only 2.01 hours. If your business is down for almost two days because customers can’t reach your servers in the cloud, it can cost your company a lot of money.
So a major advantage of the cloud is that you can distribute your services across multiple datacenters. Some Azure customers, therefore, might not have experienced one minute of downtime. Also, CloudHarmony can only estimate these downtimes because it can hardly monitor every server in every cloud datacenter around the planet.
And just last week, Azure Europe was hit with a service disruption. Obviously, Microsoft’s efforts to catch up with Amazon come at a price. Whereas Amazon can fine-tune its services and improve their reliability, Redmond is forced to add lacking features under time pressures, which increases the risk of outages.
In addition, stipulating AWS as No. 1, here are seven cloud rivals that could give it a run for its money over the next few years.
1. Rackspace: While Rackspace encompasses
Managed services and pure hosting businesses, it’s also a major cloud provider with actual, paying customers.
2. Google:
If you’re talking number of physical servers, Google could already be the biggest cloud player.
3. Microsoft:
Two-year-old Windows Azure has big capacity, but actual traction is unclear — but it is clear Microsoft is going for the gusto.
4. IBM:
IBM SmartCloud is coming up fast on AWS and Rackspace even now, according to one cloud storage expert.
5. Hewlett-Packard:
HP’s been all over the map on cloud plans, promising an Azure-based implementation a few years ago that has gone nowhere and more recently standing up an OpenStack-based public cloud.
6. VMware:
VMware’s vCloud already runs a ton of clouds for third-party providers, and the company’s Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service is gaining traction.
7. Facebook:
It’s a wildcard, but Facebook is putting serious sweat into data centers. And its applying lessons learned to the Open Compute Project, which aims to apply open source development to hardware design.
Anyway, it is hard to tell if those relatively low availability rates really hurt Azure. Despite the fact that Microsoft’s cloud has become quite powerful, Azure is the only real option for many Windows shops that count on a hybrid cloud. Also, Microsoft will manage to improve Azure’s reliability in the future. Offering cloud services is a very complex task and it will take some time before the Windows maker adapts to the self-imposed cloud-first paradigm.
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