Looks like the status quo of the world of the public clouds is going to change. Current
clear leaders, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure have almost formed bipolar
public cloud world. However the other big player that was not that eager before
is starting to challenge the leaders: Google Cloud Platform.
In public
cloud’s economy of scale the number and global distribution of the datacenters
is absolutely crucial for the leadership. This takes tremendous capital
expenditures to build and wire that kind of the global infrastructure, and huge
operational expenditures to run it; only the biggest players can do this. This
also takes great commitment to cloud computing vision to become invested in
such an expensive game.
The
expansion of the Amazon’s and Microsoft datacenter all over the world is very
impressive, you can easily see it for both companies: Microsoft Azure https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/regions/, AWS https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/ . Both of them are aggressively
trying to cover the globe even better (even under the sea: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/01/technology/microsoft-plumbs-oceans-depths-to-test-underwater-data-center.html )
What Google
responded with in terms of the datacenters for the public cloud wasn’t that
impressive, you can see the reach here: https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/ . Yes, Google has great
infrastructure supporting its own operations (search and other services), yet
not it’s Cloud Platform.
However
there is great news that Google made a higher stake on its public cloud and
going to build the datacenters in more than 10 new regions over the world till
the end of 2017: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/03/announcing-two-new-Cloud-Platform-Regions-and-10-more-to-come_22.html.
Why great
news? Because this tougher competition means better rates for the cloud
services for the consumers, more innovations from all those players. All of
them are big enough to make it, none of them look “just experimenting” now.
