In the competitive world of cloud-based computing infrastructure, Amazon remains top dog. It’s highly visible, its footprint is almost global, it incrementally adds features or cuts prices to keep competitors on their toes, and it generally manages to meet most people’s needs, most of the time. It may not always offer the lowest prices, or the best support, or the fastest processing, or the friendliest management console, but it consistently manages to meet customer demand with an offer that is more or less ‘good enough.’ It is a convenient choice, and it’s the standard against which its multitude of competitors will typically be measured. Amazon is Asda or Carrefour or WalMart to the competition’s Tesco, Marks & Spencer, Fortnum & Mason, Whole Foods, and neighbourhood deli. Amazon is not, of course, the only game in town. Far from it. Rackspace comes a close second by most measures, big names such as HP and Google are becoming increasingly serious contenders, and there is a healthy – and growing – crop of smaller providers that differentiate themselves by geography, by price, by customer domain, by specific features, and more. Indeed, I looked at some of those differentiations recently. But every one of the cloud infrastructure providers […]
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