Four takeaways from the State of Cloud Infrastructure as a Service

On Nov 06th Gartner had a webinar covering the state of Cloud hyperscalers on their IaaS offering. Here we would like to summarize to you 4 key takeaways from this webinar as well complement with our view on the topics.

1. What Cloud IaaS is (and what it is not):

• It is highly automated, which means programmed as part of application stacks.
• It is hardware “as code”, the hardware is delivered as software and can be consumed through APIs and programmed.
• Infrastructure is not anymore treated as a separated element from the application that runs on it but is a live element, treated as code, versioned as code in a repository, being reproducible, with detailed changes tracking.
• It is not rented virtualization, just moving your on-premises servers to the Cloud keeping same manual methods and processes will probably not reduce costs as well not see any real benefit from the cloud tooling and services.

2. 2019 Magic Quadrant for Cloud IaaS:

• The leading providers are innovating fast and reacting to customer feedback, have legions of software developers and highly qualified specialists dedicated to further services development, security assurance and all the needs of a big Cloud provider, something that Enterprises will never have.

Gartner 2019 Magic Quadrant IaaS.

• We will here focus just in the three market leaders: AWS, Microsoft (Azure) and Google (GCP).
• AWS is the market lead, also the oldest big IaaS player in market, focused on delivering quickly new services to dictate the market pace, at the expense of solutions that are seen as every service is developed by a different company (no API standardization, for example).
• Microsoft Azure has increased its footprint, also because of the large established customer base on the Enterprise world, but still faces some reliability issues, which is a challenge for customers.
• Google is slowly growing, currently with 4% of market share, up from near 0% in previous years, but besides que considerable growth, the Enterprise market remains a new and strange ground for Google, mostly due what Gartner says a “DNA mismatch with Enterprise IT”.

3. Providers scorecard and critical capabilities: here we would like to focus on the overall results compiled by Gartner — for more details on how they came to this conclusion as well evaluation methods used we recommend you watch the full webinar.

Basically each provider is scrutinized against the critical capabilities (in the picture below) and receive a score which sums up in the end to compile the partner score card. This can be, for example, the existence of availability zones for high available workloads within regions or how APIs can be consumed and the overall reliability over time for the respective Clouds.

As a result, we have the following main categories (pic below), which shows the dominance of AWS and Microsoft Azure on all categories, with Google as a 3rd player (with still a significant gap, most notably on Hybrid, which is somehow a “new ground” for Google).

4. The Future. Where the IaaS and hyperscalers journey will take us?Here we have some good insights and recommendations for future of IaaS on Enterprise IT:

• Multicloud is the standard, not the exception, and the goal is to get the best of breeds on every provider, this means, use the services and tools that are best for your use case, independent of cloud provider, you might have, for example, a development team that is more skilled and can deliver quickly on AWS, or a Microsoft Active Directory team that will definitely want to move to Azure AD for example.
• Lock in on cloud provider is not different from lock in on-premises, for example, if you are using SAP or Oracle databases on-premises you are also locked in to a software or solutions vendor. Multicloud is a reply to single vendor lock-in.
• Managing multicloud is challenging, but there are an increasing number of tools to harmonize it, for example for cross cloud vendors governance, security and cost optimization.

Relevant links:

• Webinar — The State of Cloud Infrastructure as Service: https://www.gartner.com/en/webinars/30031/the-state-of-cloud-infrastructure-as-a-service