http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?ct=130819&id=1-1IMDMZ5&st=sb
Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service
Source: Gartner (August 2013)
Amazon AWS
Strengths
- AWS is the overwhelming market share leader, with more than five times the compute capacity in use than the aggregate total of the other fourteen providers in this Magic Quadrant. It is a thought leader; it is extraordinarily innovative, exceptionally agile and very responsive to the market. It has the richest IaaS product portfolio, and is constantly expanding its service offerings and reducing its prices. It has by far the largest pool of capacity, which makes its service one of the few suitable for batch computing, especially for workloads that require short-term provisioning of hundreds of servers at a time.
- AWS has a very large technology partner ecosystem. Many software vendors have specially licensed and packaged their software to run on EC2, either independently or via the AWS Marketplace, which eases deployment and eliminates some of the challenges associated with licensing software to run in the cloud. Its API is supported by many third parties that provide associate management tools, and many open-source and commercial CMPs are compatible with its API. Although AWS is not directly involved in the hybrid on-premises cloud business, it has partners that can offer such solutions.
- AWS has a diverse customer base and the broadest range of use cases, including enterprise and mission-critical applications. It is increasingly targeting the mainstream market by both broadening its technical capabilities and increasing its go-to-market partnerships with SIs (such as Capgemini, Cognizant and Wipro) that provide both application development expertise and managed services. It has obtained many security and compliance-related certifications and audits. Customers may be able to access these audits under a nondisclosure agreement, but cannot conduct their own independent audits.
- AWS has multiple "availability zones" (AZs) within its regions. These AZs are effectively multiple data centers in close proximity to one another. AWS's services are designed to make it easier to run applications across multiple AZs; customers are responsible for architecting their applications for high availability. However, new capabilities are rolled out incrementally, region by region, so newer capabilities are not necessarily available in every region.
Cautions
- AWS is a price leader, but it charges separately for optional items that are often bundled with competitive offerings. This increases the complexity of understanding and auditing bills. Prospective customers should be careful to model the costs accurately, especially for network-related charges, and to compare the costs of reserved and unreserved capacity, as well as AWS's "spot pricing" market.
- AWS has multiple generations of compute instance "families" — for instance, the m1, m2, and m3 families. Each of these represents different levels of performance, and you must take this into account when choosing what instance type to use, and determine which offers the lowest cost for your particular workload. When comparing AWS's performance with that of other providers, ensure that you are making an accurate, normalized comparison; do not equate an AWS EC2 Compute Unit (ECU) with a modern physical core.
- AWS's support offerings are tiered based on the level of support that a customer purchases, rather than on a "relationship" or size-of-spend basis; the quality of support differs materially between tiers. AWS does not include enterprise-grade support by default; customers will need to buy Business tier support for this. Its Enterprise tier support offers a dedicated technical account manager and other "platinum" capabilities, providing a higher degree of support than most of its competitors offer without managed services, but it carries up to a 10% premium on the customer's overall AWS spend.
- AWS has field sales, solutions engineering and professional services organizations, but the rapid growth of AWS's business means that sales capacity is insufficient to consistently satisfy prospective customers who need consultative sales. For better terms and conditions, customers should sign an Enterprise Agreement, which is typically a zero-dollar contract. Invoicing is available on request.
Update 23/8/2013:
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