Cloud Comparison – Amazon, Google, Microsoft
May 18, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who sent me this weekend a link to an article that appeared about a month ago here. The write up was “Amazon, Google, Microsoft – Big Three Cloud Providers Examined” by Brandon Watson. His approach was to describe the cloud services of these three Web powerhouses.
My reading of his article left me with the impression that Amazon is the big dog in this kennel of pit bulls. He wrote:
AMZN is, essentially, in the load management business. They are a low margin retail operator that is running a hugely expensive infrastructure for which they are seeking maximum utilization. They would like nothing more than to be noise in their own system. AMZN is relentlessly metrics driven. As such, they have a pretty good idea of how much money to expect off of traffic that walks through their front door. They know how much to expect from traffic ending up at one of their marketplace partners. With the addition of AWS, they have a new way to monetize their capacity, and with their predictable pricing model, they know exactly how much money they are going to make off of customers who deploy applications to their service.Traffic on their network makes them money. It may not make your app money, but it makes them money, so they are happy. It more than likely saves you money, so you are probably happy too.
The Google warrants some tough love. Mr. Watson expressed his love for Google “guys” and then offered:
Applications on GAE are mostly CRUD apps, storing structured data into big table. As a developer, building an application on GAE, you are essentially feeding the GOOG beast. While they have not yet released final pricing, allow me to put on my pointy tin foil hat and talk about what might come to pass. GOOG knows exactly how much it costs to run their infrastructure, and as such could hand developers a bill for the resources which they consume. However, GOOG doesn’t have AMZN’s problem. Their traffic is mostly linear, and going up and to the right. It’s probably logarithmic at this point, but who’s counting? In any event, since they have little variability in their traffic patterns, they don’t have to get into the load management business. By allowing developers to build applications on their infrastructure, they are incurring unnecessary costs. Their motivations, however, are driven by their business model. Each new app that is plugged into the infrastructure ads new data to their data set, and creates new opportunities for page monetization.
For the Redmond giant, Mr. Watson opined:
As for MSFT, there are plenty of things I could say, but let me simply state what I believe to be our motivations. We are a platform company. We very much believe that we are in the business of delivering the best platform and tools to developers to build great applications. Our on-premise stack has proven to be extremely successful over the last several decades. With the release of the Azure Services Platform, one of the core design tenets was that we would like to achieve parity between our on and off-premise stacks. The entirety of the Azure Services Platform is designed to enable experienced MSFT developers to be combat effective on day one.
I enjoyed the article. With Amazon the king of the cloud kennel, can it hang in there with Xen and the economical approach to next-generation computing.
Stephen Arnold, May 18, 2009
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