Some quantitative data - we monitor Alexa and Fortune 500 marketshare for cloud services. This article is mostly accurate - Google has not taken much marketshare according to our stats. Currently, EC2 is 13% for Alexa 1k/10k and 11% Fortune 500. Rackspace is 5.5% Alexa 1k/10k and 19.4% Fortune 500. Google is under 1% for both, while Azure is between 1-2%. Our stats are available here:<p><a href="http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2014/12/compute-marketshare-alexa-fortune-500.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2014/12/compute-marketshare-ale...</a><p><a href="https://cloudharmony.com/cloudsquare#compare-aws:ec2-and-google:compute-and-rackspace:servers" rel="nofollow">https://cloudharmony.com/cloudsquare#compare-aws:ec2-and-goo...</a><p>Edit: added blog link
I think Google's history of shutting down products would keep me from picking Google Cloud for a major project. If Google Cloud continues to lag behind the market, you have to think they will shut it down like Google Reader, Google Wave and a number of other products. Even if Amazon isn't perfect, I feel like AWS will be around for a long time.
I work with CIOs of major companies often. The biggest driver here from what I see is that people are more familiar with AWS. All along the chain of decision making, people have experience with AWS, and can validate it for use.<p>Not so for other cloud services. It becomes inevitable when every decision maker in your chain can validate one product, and has no experience with others.
It probably helps that AWS has some big and vocal clients. NFLX has probably helped AWS drive innovation and new tooling by providing use cases that most other platforms likely don't have. It also helps that NFLX is crazy vocal on the technical side about how they use AWS to it's fullest capabilities and how they build around "limitations". Makes others feel comfortable that the stack should be able to work for anyone.<p>I'm an Azure client and prefer azure personally.
While the article was informative, it'd be a lot more interesting if it went into the reason people prefer AWS. Does anyone care to comment why they or their company decided to use AWS over competing products?
The question was asked to CIO's to "name their preferred public cloud provider". It's not clear to me what preferred means here. I'd bet a large number of them still have a large amount of on-premise. Does preferred mean the vendor with the highest compute workload, or the one they would pick <i>if</i> they were to move to the cloud?<p>I have to think that it would be the latter, because moving that much compute workload off of Google's Cloud between 2014 and 2015 would be a big effort.
> “We attribute the Google losses to AWS winning the initial branding war over Google Cloud,” he said in an email. “Specifically the initial market share lead triggers future market share gains.”<p>what a depressingly ignorant and dismissive explanation! How about technical merit, no? All of us preferring to run real OSes rather than some awkward proprietary sandbox, it's all just our falling for "branding" huh?
I moved my company over to AWS before all the other options popped up. I did have a few back and forth conversations with someone from GCE late last year, but the end of the year is not really a great time to start a move like that. We are forced to use some other Google products and the lack of support, number of new "features" that aren't thought through, and their lack of ability to give answers to BASIC and SIMPLE question drives me crazy. Sometimes it feels like they're out to specifically screw us. We've cut our adwords budget significantly. The only nagging thing that tugs at my brain is that maybe we'd be considered a 'fast' internet site and get better search engine ranking if we were on GCE. That might make it worth it.
The dominance of Amazon continues to amaze me. I thought that Google would win since this is a technology fight. In 20/20 hindsight, it's a price war, and that's in the DNA of Amazon.
prop.test(c(13, 8), c(152, 152)):<p>2-sample test for equality of proportions with continuity correction<p>data: c(13, 8) out of c(152, 152)<p>X-squared = 0.8184, df = 1, p-value = 0.3656<p>alternative hypothesis: two.sided<p>95 percent confidence interval: -0.03057673 0.09636621<p>So there's no evidence that there actually was a statistically significant change in usage of google's cloud.