Cloud showdown: Amazon vs. Rackspace vs. Microsoft vs. Google

December 04, 2012

It wouldn't be a mischaracterization to equate the cloud computing industry to the wild, wild west. There is such a variety of vendors gunning at one another and the industry is young enough that true winners and losers have not yet been determined. Amazon has established itself as the early market leader, but big-name legacy IT companies are competing hard, especially on the enterprise side, and a budding crop of startups are looking to stake their claims, too. In its latest Magic Quadrant report, research firm Gartner lists 14 infrastructure as a service (IaaS) companies, but Network World looked at four of the biggest names to compare and contrast: Amazon Web Services, Rackspace (and OpenStack), Microsoft and Google. Amazon Web Services It's hard to find someone who doesn't agree that Amazon Web Services is the market leader in IaaS cloud computing. The company has one of the widest breadths of cloud services—including compute, storage, networking, databases, load balancers, applications and application development platforms all delivered as a cloud service. Amazon has dropped its prices 21 times since it debuted its cloud six years ago and fairly consistently fills whatever gaps it has in the size of virtual machine instances on its platform—the company recently rolled out new high-memory instances, for example. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Link: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/120312-argument-cloud-264454.html