Cloud IaaS Market Share Q2 2017

https://www.srgresearch.com/articles/amazon-cloud-growth-hardly-hampered-chasing-pack

AWS has a big head start as they started years earlier and created regions all around the globe for their cloud services, for example in the Australian region we had the following order among the major cloud vendors:

• AWS arrived November 2012
• Azure arrived October 2014
• IBM Softlayer arrived October 2014
• Google GCP arrived July 2017

AWS are still over three times the size of its nearest competitor. The real benefit to cloud is the massive range of services that sit over and above IaaS, most of these services are proprietary and all the cloud API are proprietary, hence it is not easy to migrate from one cloud vendor to another.

Moving from one cloud to another is hard and the Devops teams would need to:

• Learn how to use different cloud platform including:
• Learn new APIs
• Create new build pipeline
• Learn how to secure, audit, optimise, monitor, backup and make highly available
• Change their code to use different APIs
• Test their application stack to ensure it works as expected

People are expensive and infrastructure is relatively lower in cost, yet this is very application dependent so your mileage may vary. My experience is that developers know AWS and they are too busy adding functionality to their applications to consider moving to another cloud vendor. 

Furthermore why would customers even consider moving from AWS to an another cloud vendor when the other vendors offer fewer services, have fewer regions and do not have significantly lower costs?