What Separates Cloud Leaders From Others
They are responsible for almost everything we see on the internet. They are the internet. A handful of cloud service providers, namely AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, rule the market. Their clientele includes billion-dollar streaming services, banks, federal institutions and many more. It has been more than a decade since Amazon dished out its cloud services, and it still tops the charts with Microsoft and Google at close second and third positions. Many cloud players have burst into the scene along the way but are yet to make a mark. What separates the top three from the rest is their constant revival of niche services. The big three forayed into ML-based services quite early. Now they have custom options to create chatbots, deploy AutoML, recommendation engines, and many other applications that power most companies.
A recent Gartner’s Magic Quadrant survey has named AWS, Azure, and GCP and IBM leaders in the cloud.
So what makes them unique? Let’s find out.
According to Gartner, AWS services allow organisations to deploy a wide range of AI/ML capabilities into their applications. AWS offers language, vision and autoML services for developers. The company also benefits from having an extensive set of cloud infrastructure and platform services (CIPS) that enterprises broadly adopt. This makes it easy for existing AWS customers to add these services to their contract. More than any other vendor in this Magic Quadrant, AWS is very developer-centric; other providers target data science professionals, with developers being a secondary target.
Gartner attributes Google’s commitment to the model quality, accuracy and a diverse customer portfolio to be key contributors to its place at the top in the magic quadrant. According to Gartner, Google underpins many SaaS offerings from other technology providers. The vendor actively engages open-source communities originated in Google — TensorFlow, BERT and Kubeflow, especially with the latest releases such as Document AI, Visual Inspection, etc.
Microsoft’s Azure is closing in on AWS. The company has even managed to one-up AWS to bag a billion-dollar defence contract. With larger institutions putting more confidence in Azure and CEO Satya Nadella’s aggressive move towards the cloud, AI has started to pay off. Microsoft’s ubiquity, states Gartner, gives it an advantage in the enterprise market. Developers are used to working with the company’s tools. Microsoft embeds many of its AI capabilities into its commercial products with everyday AI features. It also contributes to developing standards and guidelines for best practices associated with AI, including AI’s responsible use.
AWS offers a wide range of services, products and capabilities that allow developers to enhance the applications they are building. For instance, AWS AutoML services via Amazon SageMaker Autopilot makes it easy to build models for non-technical users. SageMaker can manage model workflows with a model registry, facilitating easy incorporation into a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline for ModelOps.
