Haozhe Zhang

Cloud Computing Research

In today’s market for cloud computing and related technologies, the competition for market share is quite fierce. Unlike other markets like the market for operating systems, which has Microsoft Windows being dominant with over 54%, the cloud computing platform hasn’t seen any sides overtake the market with more than half of the market share. As of 2023, Amazon Web Service(AWS) has a 33% market share, with its biggest competitor Microsoft Azure sitting at 21%. (Kumar, 2023).It’s fair to say that there are still plenty of opportunities for Microsoft to overtake amazon’s current position and evolve into the first choice that companies would consider when working with cloud computing technologies. In this paper, I will mainly focus on the differences between Amazon Web Service and Microsoft Azure to attempt to discover why the market is ranked like this and what made Amazon Web Service become to market leader versus Microsoft Azure.

To begin with, AWS had a three year head start compare to Azure at its beginning. This head start gave AWS the ability to establish their brand and build trust with its customers at an earlier stage compare the Azure(Source Taylor, 2023). Another crucial difference that separates these two cloud platforms is also Azure’s robust hybrid cloud set up. Microsoft Azure’s hybrid cloud combines on premise hardware with other cloud technologies on the Azure platform to offer an experience that’s catered to the customer’s individual needs. This requires the organization to maintain a level of expertise in setting up and maintaining on premise hardware since they are completely offline(Landis, 2023). This idea is similar to the concept of cloud migration that we’ve discussed in MIS 3406. Cloud Migration typically still requires companies to keep some hardware on a physical data center,  typically due to the extensive work going transition all of the data from a physical drive to a virtual cloud storage. To me personally, I see the reliance on  Hybrid Cloud from Azure as a disadvantage in expanding their market versus AWS. Of course each service will have major companies supporting them, fully utilizing the different features of each platform. However, a big percentage of the market are mid to small level companies that does not have the money and resources that major companies do. In these cases, they typically do not need any physical hardware and would rather go full cloud in order to save money. This is where AWS’s mature cloud platforms come in. In class, we’ve put a lot of emphasis on the importance of simplifying the process to save money. In comparison to Azure’s pricing system of only free trials and per minute pricing, AWS provide plenty of options that can fit the needs of customers with different expectations. Amazon have a completely free tier, which we utilized in class, a pay hour, free trial per minute, no charge for stopped, and pay for EBS volume (Taylor, 2023). More options will definitely attract more users with different needs to join AWS platform, especially smaller companies looking to utilize cloud technologies while still maintaining a small budget. An example in class that reflects this idea is our toll calculator semester project. If an organization were to built something similar to our design in class, they can accomplish the majority of the project with the free tier, while only paying a tiny amount when running the Lambda function. Everything from the data base set up to the final web page are all managed by AWS and are cloud native, clearing the customer’s worries for the possibility of future maintenances on their end.

In conclusion, one major reason that I believe shaped the market share like how it is today is AWS’s ability to offer more services using cloud native technologies with different pricing options. Their focus on cloud native rather than Hybrid Cloud is definitely boosted their popularity among smaller companies that ultimately lead to the high number of market shares that’s likely built off of the combination of major organizations”  supports as well as small companies’ trusts.

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