Taking stock of Cloud providers — 2020

Few thoughts on top 3 US based cloud providers — these aren’t meant to be hard facts handed down from the mountain top, rather to get some discussion going. Feel free to disagree in the comments below or on Twitter.

TLDR of the content below

AWS

• Continues with their flawless execution, no big mistakes
• Confused about containers and what to do with them — just doing what Google did 2 years may not be such a smart strategy
• Making right moves with OSS
• Is very worried about Google and singularly focused on them instead of focusing on real competition from Azure

Azure

• Has the best exec team in the entire cloud business — laser focused execs— future belongs to them
• Struggles with startup adoption — devs don’t pick Azure, they get told by pointy haired bosses to use Azure. Primary obstacles here seem to be bad user experience and lack of good documentation ( could you believe this from a company that did MSDN? )
• Github etc are helping with image but not with dev adoption
• Behaves and operates like a leader in Cloud business — a very smart strategy for current #2, likely to become #1 in few years

Google Cloud

• Empathetically answered the question “Is Google Cloud ready for Enterprise?” — Answer is a yes, primarily due to other enterprise adoption and a dedicated team if you are a Fortune 1000
• Confused about OSS strategy going forward — undoing goodwill built over last several years. Likely because Oracle execs running GCP don’t grok OSS
• Has matured as business, risk of GCP killing services is now the lowest it has ever been
• Does not yet understand that its a distant #3 in the US and may be #4 in the world and need to be cost competitive

Thats all folks — leave your thoughts in comments.