AWS is ‘Coca Cola in a market with no Pepsi’

A recent report from Gartner analyst Lydia Leong suggested that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is going to struggle in upcoming months as computing giants like Microsoft, Google and VMware make their next moves in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) arena.

But should AWS really feel threatened by this potential "war for market share"? We think not. In fact, there are a number of reasons this increased competition could actually spur AWS to innovate further, making the market more attractive to buyers.

Just as Microsoft dominates on-site computing, AWS is the undeniable leader in IaaS. They have been described as the "Coca Cola" in a market without a Pepsi. Having single-handedly driven the market forward at lightning speed; this monopoly alone will be tough for anyone to rival (in the short term, at least).

More importantly, while a pricing war on basic storage and compute is inevitable, the standard of additional offerings that AWS boasts is a head and shoulders above what even their closest competitor can currently offer. The likes of Microsoft and VMware now have maturing cloud platforms, giving consumers much more choice when it comes to the cost of procuring basic, foundational infrastructure. Where AWS excels, though, is in delivering features that go beyond the basic building blocks of storage and compute - services like Amazon Route 53, CloudWatch and DynamoDB.

Route 53 is AWS' scalable DNS web service. With Route 53, you can take advantage of AWS' global reach for low-latency DNS queries. As it's designed using the same architecture as other AWS resources, they work seamlessly together - giving you granular control over how your services connect.

The level of control you maintain over your platform is a huge part of why AWS is the market leader in IaaS. You can monitor and manage your resources - your databases, your load balancers, your EC2 instances - through one console using Amazon CloudWatch, without having to install extra software or worry about compatibility issues.

AWS made DNS into a service and it has done the same with databases, search, video transcoding  - the list goes on.

When Microsoft or Google can offer these levels of flexibility and control to cloud users - AWS can start to worry.  As Andy Jassy, senior vice president at AWS, said last week at the Enterprise Summit in London, "There's no compression algorithm for experience. Everybody else is just getting going - they look like AWS circa 2008."

VMware's approach is slightly different.  Although VMware has recently introduced its own cloud service, it's real strength lies in its network of vCloud Powered service providers. Our IaaS platform is built on vCloud.  We are also Consulting Partners for AWS. A large number of our customers have built their on-premise environments using VMware, which makes moving to a hybrid environment (usually the first step businesses take into cloud) very simple, without the need for any recoding or modifications. Integration of disaster recovery tools that are specifically built for VMware, like Zerto and Veeam, make replicating your workloads easy.

VMware is the world's mostly widely deployed infrastructure for enterprises workloads and back-office operations. As a vCloud provider, we are able to provide our customers with the simplest way to move to cloud services. But where AWS is great is in being able to help businesses develop large-scale web applications, and offer the flexibility to scale up and down with demand almost instantly. Both are leaders in their field, at the moment, there really is little cross-over in their best use cases.

We look forward to seeing how market share changes within the industry over the next year -and if this competition drives innovation forward like we think it will, the IaaS space could get very interesting.