Understanding the relative strengths of major cloud service providers is important to Kemp and our customers. While considering their strengths, we arrive at a more direct question; can we conclusively say which is best?
Research firm Gartner continually evaluate the market’s leading cloud service providers in an effort to answer this question, highlighting key considerations and outlining where these competitors stand with regards to them. They explore and correlate hundreds of criteria across numerous categories that inform customer decisions in the market allowing them to create a clear, if not universally conclusive, benchmark of a provider’s strengths and weaknesses.
So as for how Gartner ranks the current market leaders right now, the simple answer is AWS, 81%; Azure, 79%; Google Cloud Platform, 69%; Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, 48% (higher scores are better.) But that’s only the simple answer.
You might be attracted to AWS’s large market share, its service reliability even at large scale and its rich marketplace of third-party vendors. But you may be deterred by horizontal only-autoscaling, poor back-up facilities and a lack of VM console access.
You may be won over by the increasing capability of Microsoft products to run simultaneously on hardware and Azure Cloud and its convenient identity and access management (IAM). But these features may not make up for Azure’s lacking infrastructure for availability zones per region, slower spin-up of VMs and less than ideal responsiveness to analytic data.
Some prefer Google Cloud for its industry leading security, optimisation and cost-saving deals on continuous usage. But these benefits are counterbalanced by purely manual auto-scaling, poor LAN traffic encryption and a platform that struggles with larger databases.
Perhaps the best lesson to take from all these perspectives it that is potentially unwise to commit your organization to one service provider or depend on one for all your needs. Rather it may be best to adopt a multi-cloud strategy in which you can use whichever service provider or combination of service providers make most sense for a given job at a given time, without committing to that long term throughout your entire organization.
Kemp customers have been using our products with leading clouds and hypervisors such as AWS, Azure, VMware (including VMware Cloud on AWS), Nutanix, KVM and Hyper-V for many years.
We offer a free version of our advanced load balancer, Kemp LoadMaster. Try it for yourself now, to see a load balancer that excels across multi-cloud environments. As your application delivery requirements grow its possible upgrade to a commercial version at any time.