How long can the Amazon's cloud domain take?

IBM finally decided to start to develop OpenStack, the news came out to let a lot of people started early to celebrate the victory of open source cloud technology. But not optimistic is that, according to Forrester's James Staten, Amazon already firmly occupy more than 70% of the market, while another expert behind Amazon said that this advantage is still expanding every day.

Can Amazon win this protracted war? The question is whether Amazon will be able to withstand again and again the offensive by almost all players in the field.

Netflix, the largest customer of Amazon Web Services, said its chief architect, Adrian Cockroft, has so far answered the big question, yes, yes. During a Twitter interaction last week, Infoworld's Eric Knorr asked "Is there any other choice than OpenStack and AWS?" Cockroft's answer is also clear:

@ericknorr We have no choice. The main barrier to AWS user migration today is the vastly different capabilities of other products. OpenStack does not solve this problem.

When asked what features of AWs were available and OpenStack did not, Cockroft just insisted "too many enumerations," but "Availability Zones" and "Autoscale Group" are Two obvious examples. Cockroft further notes that the six-month release cycle of OpenStack significantly diminishes its ability to compete with Amazon with both instant update of features and price adjustments.

To put it simply, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here".

Amazon has won? Is it true that Amazon has won? If you look at the absolute number of new OpenStack and CloudStack related work, the answer is in the affirmative. But if you go to see the public interest in the trend will be another answer, here is a Google monitoring data.

If you notice the relative increase in the number of jobs, OpenStack seems to have a glimmer of hope.

This may be more convincing of OpenStack's hopes that if you take a closer look at the code in OpenStack and find out that it's no longer a Rackspace kitty, it's a real open source community that has shown strong growth momentum. It was also a year ago that I was able to find the latest data, but at that time, the impact of Red Hat and others on OpenStack was already evident.

What's the relationship? Of course.

However, I still suspect that OpenStack code contributors will find themselves harder to scale before they make some difference. Linux grew rapidly after IBM invested $ 1 billion, and Red Hat, worth mentioning, was also pushed to enterprise-class operating system standards by building a large contingent of engineers.

The same is true for OpenStack. Now he has some influence as an open source community. Good, but not enough, or even detrimental to future development, as the Gartner article put it, the climate has been established. Because the business ultimately does not care about the community, ah, what is open source, unless the product itself is very robust.

Microsoft and Google are also two companies that can not be ignored. Microsoft's operating system has the absolute dominance and has also recently aggressively pushed open source for its Azure cloud offerings. And Google is needless to say, as early as the cloud is not as hot as today when it has begun to test the water, and this company also has a good relationship with the developers, to provide developers with a lot of software and services From Android to map, from YouTube to the app suite, Google has become a big player without really getting started. Google Computer Engine performance is almost the same with Amazon, but its lower entry threshold will be able to attract more developers to try and join the camp.

Has Amazon won the first round? There is no doubt about this. But at the same time, some very competitive opponents are emerging, each with its own technical skills (Microsoft, business-friendly; OpenStack, community support; Google, developers like), are promising to catch up with Amazon.