Few years back, AWS (Amazon Web Services) was the leading IaaS aka cloud company in this market. Now everyone talks about cloud as the technology hits mainstream. Every technology vendor wants to start their services on the cloud due to the reliability, scalability and manageability it offers. It’s slowly becoming a commodity these days.
Cloud is all about virtual machines which are using the resource along with other machines on high-end hardware. But the environment to manage these machines and high availability is not easily achievable by all technology vendors. IaaS is the right choice for not just for small businesses but also for enterprises who are looking to cut down costs on running and managing their own datacenter.
This demand creates more competition in the IaaS segment. Now Google, Microsoft, IBM and HP are stepping into this business and finally the war has begun among these Titans. So what should we expect from it?
Each and every IaaS vendor has their own advantages. AWS has more experience in this service than any other vendors. But on the other hand, Microsoft has decades of experience on OS development along with various enterprise applications. Now Google enters into this market. Billions of Google users already wonder how Google is managing their servers without any latency. I never faced any latency while surfing google search or any other Google products.
Announcements about price reduction:
Competition is good. That’s what drives down the cost of any product / service and yet maintains quality. We can see frequent announcements about price drops by AWS. Even Microsoft and Google is now delivering the service at lower cost. Almost every vendor in this segment is providing service pay-as-you-go model. Looks like the cloud storage pricing in this arena is already hitting near-zero.
Extended service in all regions:
The computing and storage service is now available almost every corner of the world. Each and every year, AWS starts new data centers in some part of the world.. Soon other vendors like Microsoft, Google, IBM and HP will start their data centers everywhere. So this will help the technology vendors to choose their nearby location to launch their service. So their customers may experience excellent service without any latency.
Improved SLAs:
Every leading vendor in IaaS is providing 99.95% SLA which is really great. Even we have the option to sync up our service across all other regions. Hence, during disaster we can run the services without any interruption. But now it seems to be a manual process and need some API knowledge to achieve this. In the near future, it should be automated.
Apart from this, every IaaS vendor is now improving on customer support. They do have lots of open forums and other resources which are actually helping customers. At the same time reaching the support engineers during the urgent situations seems to a cumbersome process. Hopefully this situation will change as these giants will invest more on their support infrastructure side to help their customers.
One thing we all have to make sure amidst these price wars is there is absolutely no bubble in technology. If at any point a recession hits, all these overvalued technology will burst so big that even Google can’t find these vendors again (pun intended).
