Amazon has built a classic virtuous cycle. They got IaaS to work, disrupting the pre-existing data center outsourcing market. They achieved market dominance, enabling them to be the low-cost leader. And they figured out how to scale, facilitating unlimited growth. But such growth and market dominance cannot go on forever, can it? What—if anything—has any hope of stopping, or even slowing down, the Amazon Cloud juggernaut?
The first place to look for an AWS-killer, of course, is the competition. And perhaps the one adversary that has a real shot at dethroning Amazon is Google. They are the only competitor that understands infrastructure at scale as well as Amazon does. They also have a trusted, well-established brand, and they’ve shown they’re willing to take risks and provide market leadership. Expect better than an AWS clone from Google.