Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Worldwide 2019

AWS, Azure & GCP continue to be Leaders in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Worldwide

The report offers a nice perspective of IaaS providers. The way some of the facts & observations were worded & presented was interesting -

Applications that are potentially challenging to virtualize or run in a multitenant environment — including highly secure applications, strictly compliant or complex enterprise applications (such as SAP business applications) — require special attention to architecture.

The default and most frequently provisioned storage for AWS’s compute service has not experienced a price reduction since 2014, despite falling prices in the market for the raw components.

Google’s Customer Reliability Engineering program uses a shared-operations approach to teach customers to run operations the way that Google’s site reliability engineers do. This has the potential to tether Google more closely to enterprise customers.

Google demonstrates an immaturity of process (in areas such as contract negotiation, discounting, independent software vendor (ISV) licensing, integration with enterprise systems and support) and procedures when dealing with enterprise accounts, which can make the company difficult to transact with at times. 

AWS groups its data centers into Regions, each of which contains at least two availability zones (data centers). Microsoft calls Azure data center locations “regions”. Google operates regions with availability zones, but these zones can be separate buildings or separate power, cooling, networking, and control planes.

Microsoft Azure offers metered-by-the-second Hyper-V-virtualized multitenant compute (Azure Virtual Machines), as well as specialized large instances (such as for SAP HANA). 

Microsoft has a unique vision for the future that involves bringing in technology partners through native, first-party offerings such as those from VMware, NetApp, Red Hat, Cray and Databricks.

IBM offers both multitenant and single-tenant virtualized compute resources along with bare-metal servers.

Despite having many worldwide data centers, the IBM Cloud experience remains disjointed, as many features are available only in specific locations. It has fewer partnerships (in comparison to other providers) with major software vendors (Microsoft, SAP, Oracle) that could culminate in deployments on the IBM Cloud.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers both paid-by-the-hour, KVM-virtualized VMs as well as bare-metal servers (including a one-click installation and configuration of Oracle Database, Real Application Clusters [RAC] and Exadata) and a Docker- and Kubernetes-based container service

Alibaba Cloud earns 90% of its revenue in China and has not appreciably grown its enterprise customer base outside of China.

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