According to the latest analysis by Gartner, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is:

1. “overwhelmingly the dominant vendor” of the Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (Cloud IaaS) market
2. a clear leader, with more than five times the compute capacity in use than the aggregate total of the other fourteen providers included in the so called Magic Quadrant (MQ)
3. appreciated for “innovative, exceptionally agile and very responsive to the market and the richest IaaS product portfolio” which puts AWS into a quite far ahead position even against CSC, the only other in the Leaders quadrant currently

In addition Amazon Web Services has come up in July with a price cut that reaches 80% on its EC2 cloud computing platform.

Note that Gartner’s ranking is a complex evaluation, based on various point of views deemed to be most important from vendor-supplier point of view (see in the 3d party explanation of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant included in the Details part). It is not based on any kind of banchmarking, not even those run buy customers according to their specific application requirements. Therefore it is a well know fact that from pure cloud engineering point of view, especially in terms of focussed benchmarks Amazon EC2 is far from being a leader. The latest example of that: About the Test UnixBench runs a set of individual benchmark tests, aggregates the scores, and creates a final, indexed score to gauge the performance of UNIX-like systems,which include Linux and its distributions (Ubuntu, CentOS, and Red Hat). From the Unixbench homepage: The purpose of UnixBench is to provide a basic indicator of the performance of a Unix-like system; hence, multiple tests are used to test various aspects of the system’s performance. These test results are then compared to the scores from a baseline system to produce an index value, which is generally easier to handle than the raw scores. The entire set of index values is then combined to make an overall index for the system. The UnixBench suite used for these tests ran tests that include: Dhrystone 2, Double-precision Whetstone, numerous File Copy tests, Pipe Throughput, ProcessCreation, Shell Scripts, System Call Overhead, and Pipe-based Context Switching. Price-Performance Value: The CloudSpecs Score The CloudSpecs score calculates the relationship between the cost of a virtual server per hour and the performance average seen from each provider. The scores are relational to each other; e.g., if Provider A scores 50 and Provider B scores 100, then Provider B delivers 2x the performance value in terms of cost. The highest value provider will always receive a score of 100, and every additional provider is pegged in relation to that score. The calculation is: (Provider Average Performance Score) / (Provider Cost per Hour) = VALUE The largest VALUE is then taken as the denominator to peg other VALUES. [(Provider’s VALUE) / (Largest VALUE)] * 100 = CloudSpecs Score (CS Score) Source: IaaS Price Performance Analysis: Top 14 Cloud Providers – A study of performance among the Top 14 public cloud infrastructure providers [Cloud Spectator and the Cloud Advisory Council, Oct 15, 2013] where—in addition of Unixbench—even more focussed benchmark results are reported as well from the Phoronix Test Suite (i.e. one of benchmark suites in PTS): – For ‘”CPU Performance” the 7-Zip File Compression benchmark which runs p7zip’s integrated benchmark feature to calculate the number of instructions a CPUcan handle per second (measured in millions of instructions per second, or MIPS) when compressing a file – For “Disk Performance” the Dbench benchmark which can be used to stress a filesystem or a server to see which workload it becomes saturated and can also be used for prediction analysis to determine “How many concurrent clients/applications performing this workload can my server handle before response starts to lag?” It is an open source benchmark that contains only file-system calls for testing the disk performance. For the purpose of comparing disk performance, write results are recorded. – For “RAM Performance” the RAMspeed/SMP which is a memory performance benchmark for multi-processor machines running UNIX-like operating systems, which include Linux and its distributions(Ubuntu, CentOS, and Red Hat). Within the RAMspeed/SMP suite, the Phoronix Test Suite conducts benchmarks using a set of Copy, Scale, Add, and Triad testsfrom the *mem benchmarks (INTmem, FLOATmem, MMXmem, and SSEmem) in BatchRun mode to enable high-precision memory performance measurementthrough multiple passes with averages calculated per pass and per run. – For “Internal Network” the Iperf benchmark which is a tool used to measure bandwidth performance. For the purpose of this benchmark, Cloud Spectator set up 2 virtual machines within thesame availability zone/data center to measure internal network throughput. Amazon EC2 performed “equally bad” in these particular bechnmarks. Check the published report.

THE DETAILS BEHIND 

The 2013 Cloud IaaS Magic Quadrant [by Lydia Leong on Gartner blog, Aug 21, 2013]

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, 2013, has just been released (see the client-only interactive version, or the free reprint). Gartner clients can also consult the related charts, which summarize the offerings, features, and data center locations.

the best image obtained from the web:

We’re now updating this Magic Quadrant on a nine-month basis, and quite a bit has changed since the 2012 update (see the client-only 2012, or the free 2012 reprint).

In particular, market momentum has strongly favored Amazon Web Services. Many organizations have now had projects on AWS for several years, even if they hadn’t considered themselves to have “done anything serious” on AWS. Thus, as those organizations get serious about cloud computing, AWS is their incumbent provider — there are relatively few truly greenfield opportunities in cloud IaaS now. Many Gartner clients now actually have multiple incumbent providers (the most common combination is AWS and Terremark), but nearly all such customers tell us that the balance of new projects are going to AWS, not the other providers.

Little by little, AWS has systematically addressed the barriers to “mainstream”, enterprise adoption. While it’s still far from everything that it could be, and it has some specific and significant weaknesses, that steady improvement over the last couple of years has brought it to the “good enough” point. While we saw much stronger momentum for AWS than other providers in 2012, 2013 has really been a tipping point. We still hear plenty of interest in competitors, but AWS is overwhelmingly the dominant vendor.

At the same time, many vendors have developed relatively solid core offerings. That means that the number of differentiators in the market has decreased, as many features become common “table stakes” features that everyone has. It means that most offerings from major vendors are now fairly decent, but only a few are really stand out for their capabilities.

That leads to an unusual Magic Quadrant, in which the relative strength of AWS in both Vision and Execution essentially forces the whole quadrant graphic to rescale. (To build an MQ, analysts score providers relative to each other, on all of the formal evaluation criteria, and the MQ tool automatically plots the graphic; there is no manual adjustment of placements.) That leaves you with centralized compression of all of the other vendors, with AWS hanging out in the upper right-hand corner.

Note that a Magic Quadrant is an evaluation of a vendor in the market; the actually offering itself is only a portion of the overall score. I’ll be publishing a Critical Capabilities research note in the near future that evaluates one specific public cloud IaaS offering from each of these vendors, against its suitability for a set of specific use cases. My colleagues Kyle Hilgendorf and Chris Gaun have also been publishing extremely detailed technical evaluations of individual offerings — AWS, Rackspace, and Azure, so far.

A Magic Quadrant is a tremendous amount of work — for the vendors as well as for the analyst team (and our extended community of peers within Gartner, who review and comment on our findings). Thanks to everyone involved. I know this year’s placements came as disappointments to many vendors, despite the tremendous hard work that they put into their offerings and business in this past year, but I think the new MQ iteration reflects the cold reality of a market that is highly competitive and is becoming even more so.

A 3d party explanation of the GARTNER IaaS MAGIC QUADRANT 2013 [cloud☁mania, Aug 29, 2013]

Gartner just released the 2013 update of his traditionally Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service. Here are some consideration about the evaluation methodology and MQ players.

In the context of this Magic Quadrant, IaaS is defined by Gartner as “a standardized, highly automated offering, where compute resources, complemented by storage and networking capabilities, are owned by a service provider and offered to the customer on demand. The resources are scalable and elastic in near-real-time, and metered by use. Self-service interfaces are exposed directly to the customer, including a Web-based UI and API optionally. The resources may be single-tenant or multitenant, and hosted by the service provider or on-premises in the customer’s datacentre.”

To be included in Magic Quadrant IaaS providers should target enterprise and midmarket customers, offering high-quality services, with excellent availability, good performance, high security and good customer support. For each IaaS provider included in MQ Gartner is offering deep description related to services offer like: datacentre locations, computing issues, storage & network features, special notes, and recommended users. Also deep comments about Strengths & Caution in Cloud adoption are offered for each IaaS provider, despite the MQ positioning.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for IaaS is a more than eloquent picture of actual status of IaaS major players. IaaS market momentum is strongly dominated by Amazon Web Services both Vision and Execution essentially directions. According Garner analysts, AWS is a clear leader, with more than five times the compute capacity in use than the aggregate total of the other fourteen providers included in MQ. AWS is appreciated for “innovative, exceptionally agile and very responsive to the market and the richest IaaS product portfolio”.

The Leaders Quadrant is positioning CSC as second player, a traditional IT outsourcer with a broad range of datacentre outsourcing capabilities. CSC is appreciated for his commitment to embrace the highly standardized cloud model, and his solid platform attractive to traditional IT operations organizations that still want to retain control, but need to offer greater agility to the business

The Challengers Quadrant is including Verizon Terremark – the market share leader in VMware-virtualized public cloud IaaS, Dimension Data – a large SI and VAR entering in the cloud IaaS market through the 2011 acquisition of OpSource, and Savvis – a CenturyLink company with a long track record of leadership in the hosting market.

Big surprise for Visionaries Quadrant is the comfortable positioning of Microsoft with his Windows Azure platform.  Previously strictly PaaS, Azure is becoming IaaS also in April 2013 when Microsoft launched Windows Azure Infrastructure Services which include Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks.  Microsoft place in Visionary Quadrant is motivated by Gartner by the global vision of infrastructure and platform services “that are not only leading stand-alone offerings, but also seamlessly extend and interoperate with on-premises Microsoft infrastructure (rooted in Hyper-V, Windows Server, Active Directory and System Center) and applications, as well as Microsoft’s SaaS offerings.” 

Between the IaaS providers from the Niche Players Quadrant, we have to note the presence of heawy playes triade:IBM, HP, and Fujitsu. Gartner appreciate IBM for his wide range of cloud-related products and services, IaaS MQ analyse including only cloud offering from SmartCloud Enterprise (SCE) and cloud-enabled infrastructure service IBM SmartCloud Enterprise+. In the same way, from HP’s range of cloud-related products and services Gartner is considered only HP Public Cloud and some cloud-enabled infrastructure services, such HP Enterprise Services Virtual Private Cloud. Fujitsu is one of the few non-American cloud providers, being appreciated by Gartner for the large cloud IaaS offerings, including the Fujitsu Cloud IaaS Trusted Public S5 (formerly the Fujitsu Global Cloud Platform), multiple regional offerings based on a global reference architecture (Fujitsu Cloud IaaS Private Hosted, formerly known as Fujitsu Local Cloud Platform), and multiple private cloud offerings, especially in Asia-Pacific area and Europe.

Speaking about non-America regions we should observe that significant European-based providers like CloudSigma, Colt, Gigas, Orange Business Services, OVH and Skyscape Cloud Services was not included in this Magic Quadrant. The same for Asia/Pacific region with major players like Datapipe, NTT and Tata Communications.

Gartner considered also two offerings that are currently in beta stage, and therefore could not be included in this evaluation, but could be considered as prospective players of next MQ edition: Google Compute Engine (GCE) – a model similar to Amazon EC2′s, and VMware vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) – a full-featured offering with more functionality than vCloud Datacenter Service.

Additional Gartner blog posts related to that:

Cloud IaaS market share and the developer-centric world [by Lydia Leong on Gartner blog, Sept 4, 2013]

Bernard Golden recently wrote a CIO.com blog post in response to my announcement of Gartner’s 2013 Magic Quadrant for Cloud IaaS. He raised a number of good questions that I thought it would be useful to address. This is part 1 of my response. (See part 2 for more.)

(Broadly, as a matter of Gartner policy, analysts do not debate Magic Quadrant results in public, and so I will note here that I’m talking about the market, and not the MQ itself.)

Bernard: “Why is there such a distance between AWS’s offering and everyone else’s?”

In the Magic Quadrant, we rate not only the offering itself in its current state, but also a whole host of other criteria — the roadmap, the vendor’s track record, marketing, sales, etc. (You can go check out the MQ document itself for those details.) You should read the AWS dot positioning as not just indicating a good offering, but also that AWS has generally built itself into a market juggernaut. (Of course, AWS is still far from perfect, and depending on your needs, other providers might be a better fit.)

But Bernard’s question can be rephrased as, “Why does AWS have so much greater market share than everyone else?”

Two years ago, I wrote two blog posts that are particularly relevant here:

• Common Service Provider Myths About Cloud Infrastructure
• In Cloud IaaS, Developers are the Face of Business Buyers

These posts were followed up wih two research notes (links are Gartner clients only):

• New Entrants to the Cloud IaaS Market Face Tough Competitive Challenges
• How Buyers Purchase Cloud IaaS

I have been beating the “please don’t have contempt for developers” drum for a while now. (I phrase it as “contempt” because it was often very clear that developers were seen as lesser, not real buyers doing real things — merely ignoring developers would have been one thing, but contempt is another.) But it’s taken until this past year before most of the “enterprise class” vendors acknowledged the legitimacy of the power that developers now hold.

Many service providers held tight to the view espoused by their traditional IT operations clientele: AWS was too dangerous, it didn’t have sufficient infrastructure availability, it didn’t perform sufficiently well or with sufficient consistency, it didn’t have enough security, it didn’t have enough manageability, it didn’t have enough governance, it wasn’t based on VMware — and it didn’t look very much like an enterprise’s data center architecture. The viewpoint was that IT operations would continue to control purchases, implementations would be relatively small-scale and would be built on traditional enterprise technologies, and that AWS would never get to the point that they’d satisfy traditional IT operations folks.

What they didn’t count on was the fact that developers, and the business management that they ultimately serve, were going to forge on ahead without them. Or that AWS would steadily improve its service and the way it did business, in order to meet the needs of the traditional enterprise. (My colleagues in GTP — the Gartner division that was Burton Group — do a yearly evaluation of AWS’s suitability for the enterprise, and each year, AWS gets steadily, materially better. Clients: see the latest.)

Today, AWS’s sheer market share speaks for itself. And it is definitely not just single developers with a VM or two, start-ups, or non-mission-critical stuff. Through the incredible amount of inquiry we take at Gartner, we know how cloud IaaS buyers think, source, succeed, and sometimes suffer. And every day at Gartner, we talk to multiple AWS customers (or prospects considering their options, though many have already bought something on the click-through agreement). Most are traditional enterprises of the G2000 variety (including some of the largest companies in the world), but over the last year, AWS has finally cracked the mid-market by working with systems integrator partners. The projected spend levels are clearly increasing dramatically, the use cases are extremely broad, the workloads increasingly have sensitive data and regulatory compliance concerns, and customers are increasingly thinking of AWS as a strategic vendor.

(Now, as my colleagues who cover the traditional data center like to point out, the spend levels are still trivial compared to what these customers are spending on the rest of their data center IT, but I think what’s critical here is the shift in thinking about where they’ll put their money in the future, and their desire to pick a strategic vendor despite how relatively early-stage the market is.)

But put another way — it is not just that AWS advanced its offering, but it convinced the market that this is what they wanted to buy (or at least that it was a better option than the other offerings), despite the sometimes strange offering constructs. They essentially created demand in a new type of buyer — and they effectively defined the category. And because they’re almost always first to market with a feature — or the first to make the market broadly aware of that capability — they force nearly all of their competitors into playing catch-up and me-too.

That doesn’t mean that the IT operations buyer isn’t important, or that there aren’t an array of needs that AWS does not address well. But the vast majority of the dollars spent on cloud IaaS are much more heavily influenced by developer desires than by IT operations concerns — and that means that market share currently favors the providers who appeal to development organizations. That’s an ongoing secular trend — business leaders are currently heavily growth-focused, and therefore demanding lots of applications delivered as quickly as possible, and are willing to spend money and take greater risks in order to obtain greater agility.

This also doesn’t mean that the non-developer-centric service providers aren’t important. Most of them have woken up to the new sourcing pattern, and are trying to respond. But many of them are also older, established organizations, and they can only move so quickly. They also have the comfort of their existing revenue streams, which allow them the luxury of not needing to move so quickly. Many have been able to treat cloud IaaS as an extension of their managed services business. But they’re now facing the threat of systems integrators like Cognizant and Capgemini entering this space, combining application development and application management with managed services on a strategic cloud IaaS provider’s platform — at the moment, normally AWS. Nothing is safe from the broader market shift towards cloud computing.

As always, every individual customer’s situation is different from another’s, and the right thing to do (or the safe, mainstream thing to do) evolves through the years. Gartner is appropriately cautionary when it discusses such things with clients. This is a good time to mention that Magic Quadrant placement is NEVER a good reason to include or exclude a vendor from a short list. You need to choose the vendor that’s right for your use case, and that might be a Niche Player, or even a vendor that’s not on the MQ at all — and even though AWS has the highest overallplacement, they might be completely unsuited to your use case.

Where are the challengers to AWS? [by Lydia Leong on Gartner blog, Sept 4, 2013]

This is part of 2 of my response to Bernard Golden’s recent CIO.com blog post in response to my announcement of Gartner’s 2013 Magic Quadrant for Cloud IaaS. (Part 1 was posted yesterday.)

Bernard: “What skill or insight has allowed AWS to create an offering so superior to others in the market?”

AWS takes a comprehensive view of “what does the customer need”, looks at what customers (whether current customers or future target customers) are struggling with, and tries to address those things. AWS not only takes customer feedback seriously, but it also iterates at shocking speed. And it has been willing to invest massively in engineering. AWS’s engineering organization and the structure of the services themselves allows multiple, parallel teams to work on different aspects of AWS with minimal dependencies on the other teams. AWS had a head start, and with every passing year their engineering lead has grown larger. (Even though they have a significant burden of technical debt from having been first, they’ve also solved problems that competitors haven’t had to yet, due to their sheer scale.)

Many competitors haven’t had the willingness to invest the resources to compete, especially if they think of this business as one that’s primarily about getting a VM fast and that’s all. They’ve failed to understand that this is a software business, where feature velocity matters. You can sometimes manage to put together brilliant, hyper-productive small teams, but this is usually going to get you something that’s wonderful in the scope of what they’ve been able to build, but simply missing the additional capabilities that better-resourced competitors can manage (especially if a competitor can muster both resources and hyper-productivity). There are some awesome smaller companies in this space, though.

Bernard: “Plainly stated, why hasn’t a credible competitor emerged to challenge AWS?”

I think there’s a critical shift happening in the market right now. Three very dangerous competitors are just now entering the market — Microsoft, Google, and VMware. I think the real war for market share is just beginning.

For instance, consider the following, off the cuff, thoughts on those vendors. These are by no means anything more than quick thoughts and not a complete or balanced analysis. I have a forthcoming research note called “Rise of the Cloud IaaS Mega-Vendors” that focuses on this shift in the competitive landscape, and which will profile these four vendors in particular, so stay tuned for more. So, that said:

Microsoft has brand, deep customer relationships, deep technology entrenchment, and a useful story about how all of those pieces are going to fit together, along with a huge army of engineers, and a ton of money and the willingness to spend wherever it gains them a competitive advantage; its weakness is Microsoft’s broader issues as well as the Microsoft-centricity of its story (which is also its strength, of course). Microsoft is likely to expand the market, attracting new customers and use cases to IaaS — including blended PaaS models.

Google has brand, an outstanding engineering team, and unrivaled expertise at operating at scale; its weakness is Google’s usual challenges with traditional businesses (whatever you can say about AWS’s historical struggle with the enterprise, you can say about Google many times over, and it will probably take them at least as long as AWS did to work through that). Google’s share gain will mostly come at the expense of AWS’s base of HPC customers and young start-ups, but it will worm its way into the enterprise via interactive agencies that use its cloud platform; it should have a strong blended PaaS model.

VMware has brand, a strong relationship with IT operations folks, technology it can build on, and a hybrid cloud story to tell; whether or not its enterprise-class technology can scale to global-class clouds remains to be seen, though, along with whether or not it can get its traditional customer base to drive sufficient volume of cloud IaaS. It might expand the market, but it’s likely that much of its share gain will come at the expense of VMware-based “enterprise-class” service providers.

Obviously, it will take these providers some time to build share, and there are other market players who will be involved, including the other providers that are in the market today (and for all of you wondering “what about OpenStack”, I would classify that under the fates of the individual providers who use it). However, if I were to place my bets, it would be on those four at the top of market share, five years from now. They know that this is a software business. They know that innovative capabilities are vitally necessary. And they know that this has turned into a market fixated on developer productivity and business benefits. At least for now, that view is dominating the actual spending in this market.

You can certainly argue that another market outcome should have happened, that users shouldhave chosen differently, or even that users are making poor decisions now that they’ll regret later. That’s an interesting intellectual debate, but at this point, Sisyphus’s rock is rolling rapidly downhill, so anyone who wants to push it back up is going to have an awfully difficult time not getting crushed.

Verizon Cloud is technically innovative, but is it enough? [by Lydia Leong on Gartner blog, Oct 4, 2013]

Verizon Terremark has announced the launch of its new Verizon Cloud service built using its own technology stack.

Verizon already owns a cloud IaaS offering — in fact, it owns several. Terremark was an early AWS competitor with the Terremark Enterprise Cloud, a VMware-based offering that got strong enterprise traction during the early years of this market (and remains the second-most-common cloud provider amongst Gartner’s clients, with many companies using both AWS and Terremark), as well as a vCloud Express offering. Verizon entered the game later with Verizon Compute as a Service (now called Enterprise Cloud Managed Edition), also VMware-based. Since Verizon’s acquisition of Terremark, the company has continued to operate all the existing platforms, and intends to continue to do so for some time to come.

However, Verizon has had the ambition to be a bigger player in cloud; like many other carriers, it believes that network services are a commodity and a carrier needs to have stickier, value-added, higher-up-the-stack services in order to succeed in the future. However, Verizon also understood that it would have to build technology, not depend on other people’s technology, if it wanted to be a truly competitive global-class cloud player versus Amazon (and Microsoft, Google, etc.).

With that in mind, in 2011, Verizon went and made a manquisition — acquiring CloudSwitch not so much for its product (essentially hypervisor-within-a-hypervisor that allows workloads to be ported across cloud infrastructures using different technologies), as for its team. It gave them a directive to go build a cloud infrastructure platform with a global-class architecture that could run enterprise-class workloads, at global-class scale and at fully competitive price points.

Back in 2011, I conceived what I called the on-demand infrastructure fabric (see my blog post No World of Two Clouds, or, for Gartner clients, the research note, Market Trends: Public and Private Cloud Infrastructure Converge into On-Demand Infrastructure Fabrics) — essentially, a global-class infrastructure fabric with self-service selectable levels of availability, performance, and isolation. Verizon is the first company to have really built what I envisioned (though their project predates my note, and my vision was developed independently of any knowledge of what they were doing).

The Verizon Cloud architecture is actually very interesting, and, as far as I know, unique amongst cloud IaaS providers. It is almost purely a software-defined data center. Components are designed at a very low level — a custom hypervisor, SDN augmented with the use of NPUs, virtualized distributed storage. Verizon has generally tried to avoid using components for which they do not have source code. There are very few hardware components — there’s x86 servers, Arista switches, and commodity Flash storage (the platform is all-SSD). The network is flat, and high bandwidth is an expectation (Verizon is a carrier, after all). Oh, and there’s object-based storage, too (which I won’t discuss here).

The Verizon Cloud has a geographically distributed control plane designed for continuous availability, and it, along with the components, are supposed to be updatable without downtime (i.e., maintenance should not impact anything). It’s intended to provide fine-grained performance controls for the compute, network, and storage resource elements. It is also built to allow the user to select fault domains, allowing strong control of resource placement (such as “these two VMs cannot sit on the same compute hardware”); within a fault domain, workloads can be rebalanced in case of hardware failure, thus offering the kind of high availability that’s often touted in VMware-based clouds (including Terremark’s previous offerings). It is also intended to allow dynamic isolation of compute, storage, and networking components, allowing the creation of private clouds within a shared pool of hardware capacity.

The Verizon Cloud is intended to be as neutral as possible — the theory is that all VM hypervisors can run natively on Verizon’s hypervisor, many APIs can be supported (including its own API, the existing Terremark API, and the AWS, CloudStack, and OpenStack APIs), and there’ll be support for the various VM image formats. Initially, the supported hypervisor is a modified Xen. In other words, Verizon wants to take your workloads, wherever you’re running them now, and in whatever form you can export them.

It’s an enormously ambitious undertaking. It is, assuming it all works as promised, a technical triumph — it’s the kind of engineering you expect out of an organization like AWS or Google, or a software company like Microsoft or VMware, not a staid, slow-moving carrier (the mere fact that Verizon managed to launch this is a minor miracle unto itself). It is actually, in a way, what OpenStack might have aspired to be; the delta between this and the OpenStack architecture is, to me, full of sad might-have-beens of what OpenStack had the potential to be, but is not and is unlikely to become. (Then again, service providers have the advantage of engineering to a precisely-controlled environment. OpenStack, and for that matter, VMware, need to run on whatever junk the customer decides to use, instantly making the problem more complex.)

Unfortunately, the question at this stage is: Will anybody care?

Yes, I think this is an important development in the market, and the fact that Verizon is already a credible cloud player in the enterprise, with an entrenched base in the Terremark Enterprise Cloud, will help it. But in a world where developers control most IaaS purchasing, the bare-bones nature of the new Verizon offering means that it falls short of fulfilling the developer desire for greater productivity. In order to find a broader audience, Verizon will need to commit to developing all the richness of value-added capabilities that the market leaders will need — which likely means going after the PaaS market with the same degree of ambition, innovation, and investment, but certainly means committing to rapidly introducing complementing capabilities and bringing a rich ecosystem in the form of a software marketplace and other partnerships. Verizon needs to take advantage of its shiny new IaaS building blocks to rapidly introduce additional capabilities — much like Microsoft is now rapidly introducing new capabilities into Azure.

With that, assuming that this platform performs as designed, and Verizon can continue to treat Terremark’s cloud folks like they belong to a fast-moving start-up and not an ossified pipe provider, Verizon may have a shot at being one of the leaders in this market. Without that, the Verizon Cloud is likely to be relegated to a niche, just like every other provider whose capabilities stop at the level of offering infrastructure resources.

From: Amazon.com Announces Third Quarter Sales up 24% to $17.09 Billion [press release, Oct 24, 2013]

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced more than 15 new features and enhancements to its fully managed relational and NoSQL database services. Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) now supports Oracle Statspack performance diagnostics and has expanded MySQL support, including capabilities for zero downtime data migration. Enhancements to Amazon DynamoDB include new cross-region support, a local test tool, and location-based query capabilities.
• AWS continued to bolster its management services, making it easier to provision and manage more AWS resources with AWS CloudFormation and AWS OpsWorks, which both added support for Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). AWS also enhanced the AWS Console mobile app and introduced a new Command Line Interface.
• AWS continued to gain momentum in the public sector and now has more than 2,400 education institutions and 600 government agencies as customers, including recent new projects with customers such as the U.S. Federal Drug Administration.

THE JULY PRICE CUT

From Amazon.com Announces Second Quarter Sales up 22% to $15.70 Billion [press release, July 25, 2013]

• AWS announced it had lowered prices by up to 80% on Amazon EC2 Dedicated Instances, instances that run on single-tenant hardware dedicated to a single customer account. In addition, AWS lowered prices on Amazon RDS instances with On-Demand price reductions of up to 28% and Reserved Instance (RI) price reductions of up to 27%.
• Amazon Web Services (AWS) became the first major cloud provider to achieve FedRAMP Compliance which recognizes the ability of AWS to meet extensive security requirements and compliance mandates for running sensitive US government applications and protecting data. FedRAMP certification simplifies and speeds the ability for government agencies to evaluate and adopt AWS for a wide range of applications and workloads.
• AWS announced the launch of the AWS Certification Program, which recognizes IT professionals that possess the skills and technical knowledge necessary for building and maintaining applications and services on the AWS Cloud. AWS Certifications help organizations identify candidates and consultants who are proficient at architecting and developing for the cloud.
• AWS further enhanced its security and identity management capabilities across several services – introducing resource-level permissions for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), adding identity federation to AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), extending Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) Server Side Encryption support to Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (EMR), and adding custom SSL certificate support for CloudFront. These enhancements give customers more granular security controls over their AWS deployments, applications and sensitive data.

• Et cetera (you can find the AWS highlights in every quarterly release about financials)
• All AWS related press releases

Some directly related and general/major previous press releases from that overall list:

• December, 2012: Amazon Web Services Introduces New Amazon EC2 High Storage Instance Family
• July, 2012: Amazon Web Services Introduces New Amazon EC2 High I/O Instance Type
• October, 2008: Amazon Web Services Launches Amazon EC2 for Windows
• August, 2008: Amazon Web Services Launches Amazon Elastic Block Store for Amazon EC2