If you are familiar with the cloud computing market, you know that Amazon Web Services, or AWS, is the main player. Although AWS does not control as much cloud market share as before, it is always way ahead of its nearest competitors — namely, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
the $482 billion The question, of course, is if and when that will change – will AWS cease to be the predominant public cloud provider for the foreseeable future, and if so, why?
I won’t claim to know when AWS might cease to hold a majority share of the cloud market. But I will tell you that, if it does, it will likely be due at least in part to the following factors, which are arguably the biggest threats to AWS market share right now.
Inflexible hybrid cloud
Compared to other public cloud providers, AWS Hybrid Cloud Offerings are less flexible and may cause buyers to worry more about being locked in to the seller.
AWS’ primary hybrid cloud platform, Outposts, requires hardware purchased from AWS and only supports AWS cloud services. Other AWS hybrid solutions, such as EKS Anywhere, are more flexible from a hardware perspective, but still tie users to AWS services.
In contrast, solutions like Azure Arc and Google Anthos are hardware-agnostic and give users a broader set of cloud services to choose from.
If AWS loses cloud market share over the next few years, I suspect much of that will be because consumers see it as not offering the most competitive hybrid cloud solutions in a world where the hybrid cloud demand is skyrocketing.
Regulatory threats
AWS is an outlier in the cloud computing market because it is part of a company that only partially focuses on cloud computing. The other main component of its operations – e-commerce – has little to do with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or software as a service (SaaS).
In this sense, there is a argument to make that AWS is more likely to come under the radar of regulators who view it as a monopoly threat. Microsoft and Google could be accused of abusing privacy rights like Amazon, but they can’t be accused of trying to build mega-conglomerates that allow them to dominate several unrelated industries. They’re just tech companies, after all.
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