Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service

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Amazon Web Services

AWS, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, is a cloud-focused service provider with a very pure vision of highly automated, cost-effective IT capabilities, delivered in a flexible, on-demand manner.

Locations: AWS has groups of data centers, which it calls "regions," on the East and West Coasts of the U.S., and in Ireland, Japan, Singapore, Australia, Brazil, and (in preview) China. It also has one region dedicated to the U.S. federal government. It has global sales. Support is provided in English, Japanese and Portuguese. Technical account managers can also provide support in German, Spanish, Hindi, Korean and Mandarin. The portal and documentation are available in English, Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Korean and Mandarin.

Compute: Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offers multitenant, fixed-size and nonresizable, Xen-virtualized VMs without autorestart. Single-tenant VMs are available via Dedicated Instances. There are special options for HPC, including graphics processing units (GPUs). AWS does not have any formal private cloud offerings, though it is willing to negotiate such deals (such as its deal for the U.S. intelligence community cloud).

Storage: VM storage is ephemeral. Persistence requires VM-independent block storage (Elastic Block Store). There is an option for SSDs, as well as storage performance guarantees (Provisioned IOPS). Object-based storage (Simple Storage Service [S3]) is integrated with a CDN (CloudFront), there is an option for long-term archive storage (Glacier), and AWS offers its own cloud storage gateway appliance.

Network: AWS offers a full range of networking options. Complex networking and IPsec VPN is done via Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Third-party connectivity is via partner exchanges (AWS Direct Connect).

Security: RBAC is per-element, with customer-defined roles and exceptional control over permissions. AWS has obtained many security and compliance-related certifications and audits.

Other notes: Enterprise-grade support is extra. The SLA is multi-fault-domain, but does not have any exclusion for maintenance; AWS also offers continuous availability on its portal and API. Notable capabilities include orchestration (CloudFormation and OpsWorks), autoscaling, database as a service (Relational Database Service [RDS]), Hadoop as a service (Elastic MapReduce), data warehousing as a service (Redshift), and desktop as a service (WorkSpaces). AWS does not offer colocation; a partner exchange must be used instead. We provide purchasing guidance in "What Managers Need to Know About Amazon Web Services" and a detailed technical evaluation in "Amazon Web Services (AWS): In-Depth Assessment."

Recommended uses: All use cases that run well in a virtualized environment, although highly secure applications, strictly compliant or enterprise applications (especially complex ones such as SAP business applications) require special attention to architecture.

Strengths

• AWS has a diverse customer base and the broadest range of use cases, including enterprise and mission-critical applications. It is the overwhelming market share leader, with more than five times the cloud IaaS compute capacity in use than the aggregate total of the other 14 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 array of IaaS features and PaaS-like capabilities, and continues to rapidly expand its service offerings. It is the provider most commonly chosen for strategic adoption.
• 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 associated 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 an extensive network of partners that can offer assistance with adopting its platform. It is increasingly targeting mainstream enterprises and the midmarket via go-to-market partnerships with SIs (such as Capgemini, Cognizant and Wipro) that provide application development expertise, managed services and professional services such as data center migration, although such providers do not necessarily deliver solutions that are optimal for the cloud environment. There are also many consulting and managed services partners that offer a cloud-native approach, such as Datapipe and 2nd Watch.
• 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 sometimes 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'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.
• AWS is beginning to face significant competition — from Microsoft in the traditional business market, and from Google in the cloud-native market. So far, it has responded aggressively to price drops by competitors on commodity resources. However, although it is continuously reducing its prices, it does not commodity-price services where it has superior capabilities. AWS currently has a multiyear competitive advantage, but is no longer the only fast-moving, innovative, global-class provider in the market.