AWS has 45% share of public cloud infrastructure market | Hacker News Reader

AWS has 45% share of public cloud infrastructure market

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35 pointsprostoalex15 comments

It is hilarious to me to read an analyst report that ignores App Engine (or even Heroku! Or is that what they meant by "Salesforce"?) in the PaaS space. Snapchat is primarily an App Engine (plus Datastore) customer. They have more daily active users than Twitter. Unless Beanstalk is way bigger than I think it is, App Engine has the lion's share of the PaaS market.

We're all tight lipped on purpose. People guessing from the outside will basically be wrong until results become public (I applaud the folks at AWS for breaking out their segment publicly; you may have noticed how much their stock spiked when they did so as analyst consensus was way off).

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud, but not specifically on App Engine.

How about OVH, online, GoDaddy, Digital Ocean, Linode???

That's a naughty article ignoring all the old players.

> How about OVH, online, GoDaddy, Digital Ocean, Linode???

None of them really are AWS competitors. The competition is Azure and Google Cloud (and a few other enterprise oriented IAAS but not really opened to the public). And frankly, Google Cloud is actually getting really good. Just compare Google Cloud interface with AWS ... it's day and night. And I was extremely critical of App Engine PAAS before and its stupid limitations (and the joke datastore is) so I'm not a Google fan boy at all, quite the contrary.

It wouldn't surprise me if, by the end of 2020, Google Cloud takes a significant size of the market. Right now it has still a few problems though, but nothing that cannot be fixed on the long run. I'm personally thinking about recommending GCloud over AWS to my clients, especially if they end up fixing 1 or 2 few stuff ASAP.

Azure of course it better for anything Windows and .Net related.

They are not competing directly but their numbers is still important to know the market(s). They are big companies with many customers, they shouldn't be dismissed.

I agree that it's important to size the VPS market, as it directly competes with one of the primary things people come to AWS or GCP for ("How do I host my site?"). As a side comment mentions, I might also include GoDaddy as well as DreamHost and the underlying brands of Endurance, since again so much of the "cloud" is really just people running WordPress "brochure ware" sites.

Having said that, you should realize that some of those companies (GoDaddy, Endurance) are public and even indicate how large they are from an infrastructure sense. Ultimately, VPS and/or website hosting comes down to charging customers $5/month for approximately $0 in infrastructure. The "real" infrastructure money is in either large compute, or "serious" sites. So it is important, but ultimately they'll round towards 0.

Disclaimer: I work on Google Cloud, and have never worked for any of the other companies mentioned.

My point is it is not the same market to begin with. OVH PAAS and IAAS offer is limited compared to AWS.

Just in case we're not already working on them, feel free to send me your few things and I'll route them to the appropriate PMs and engineers. (Contact info in profile)

It wouldn't have helped the author make coherent charts that backed the narrative that Amazon is dominating thus far.

At least mentioning the names and what % the other's had would've been nice.

They have ~nothing in China.

I suspect that you're probably correct but I wasn't able to find cloud providers by market share in China. Do you know of any studies?

China's market is fragmented through regulation, so there are small-scale providers in all provinces. I guess the largest player is Alibaba's Aliyun ("Ali cloud") @ https://intl.aliyun.com/ who also have a startup support program @ https://intl.aliyun.com/startup

Depends on if a cloud server in China counts as publishing content. If so, China's massive dragnet of regulation because of their information suppression laws probably gives foreign companies pause at putting up infrastructure in china. I can imagine a DMCA-like law that has no safe harbor and just has liability for accidentally hosting information that is deemed to be needing suppression.

China makes you register your site and who operates it, which is fairly straightforward, but in reality everything is pretty light touch really. If the government found something they weren't happy with, they'd give you a call or pay you a visit and explain. You don't argue, take it down, don't make a mess again. It's no big deal. Just don't go hosting Free Tibet or Tiananmen tell-alls and you're fine. It's no different to the west, really. One could even say here they're more transparent.

You have to register your site and your details with a government that has shown a heavy hand when it comes to censorship.

Definitely no different than the west. Definitely more transparent.

People host all sorts of stuff that decries their governments in the West, talks about how awful their actions are, etc etc etc, all without being taken down. You're REALLY sipping the kool-aid if you think that what you're describing is remotely similar to the west.

Really, the policing is very light touch. Just because you have to register, doesn't mean the information is used or checked. You don't have to register if your site is overseas, but then if the government doesn't like it they will block it for those without VPNs... but everyone has a VPN. People here talk plenty about politics, and always in the negative. It's just that publishing serious criticism is generally off-limits. Academics and motivated journalists can do it, but they know where the line is. Normal people don't, because they know it won't do any good. That, to my eyes, is more transparent.

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