Cloud is a six-horse race, and three of those have been lapped Analyst firm Gartner’s 2018 Magic Quadrant for infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) has again found that Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are the most mature clouds, but has omitted more than half of the vendors it covered last year on grounds that customers now demand more than just rented servers and storage. “Customers …
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For cloud vendor lock-in, it's possible to have a near identical setup between cloud and on-prem.
Unless you want to use the features that are available to simplify administration of the environment and free up your time before the tasks on the back log...
The reality is that most of the cloud issues presented including lock-in are a shade of grey rather than black or white. If there's a genuine business benefit from using cloud (and the benefits vary significantly by application and business...) or is the self-imposed on-prem lock-in actually holding your business back?
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The Vogon,
Be careful. Due to the nature of cloud there are a lot of things that you can't do in the cloud that are impractical/impossible to do on-prem. This means that it is not always possible to bring it back in-house. For example, Microsoft Azure Partner training cautions there are significant differences between Azure SQL and SQL on premise. This is a reflection of the enhanced functionality of the Azure version rather than an indictment of the on-prem version.
IMHO in 2018 there are significant challenges with migrating to the cloud and challenges with migrating between clouds. Migrations are being successfully delivered every day but anyone who tries to tell you the process is trivial or straightforward is being disingenous.
"Google’s positioned itself as the most cost-effective cloud, but “its deepest negotiated discounts are usually limited to a single-year contract.”"
So a race to the bottom. From the many calls and attempts to add me on Linked in from their increasingly desperate sales staff, I keep imagining a deserted datacentre with rolling tumbleweeds...
Thanks for sharing the link to the non paywalled MS funded document. Having worked with both top (AWS) and bottom (IBM) of these providers, I can safely say that there are some useful warnings in there worth reading. The most insightful may be the statement at the end regarding the lock-in that isn't meant to be associated with cloud services.
Even bigger thanks for the graphic. It is so long since I have seen one of these (since the death of daisy wheel and golf-ball printers) that the artistry involved almost brought a tear to my eye.
Mind you I don't mind the death of those printers since I am sure they played a large part in my need for hearing aids in both ears.
When my outfit started getting Gartner reports I asked where the "declaration of interest" was: where in the report did they declare which of the reviewed companies had a relationship with Gartner? There was always an embarrassed hush at that point, and a careful analysis of the tops of shoes.
Take this all with a grain of salt, of course. Gartner leans strongly towards "current trends will continue" so that the people who buy these reports can justify their decision making process and point to the Gartner report instead of taking the fall themselves if something goes wrong. They pay a lot of money to be able to do this.
... unless it's about Anti-virus: I'm pretty sure Symantec is paying gartner a trailer of money every month to ensure that it's still classed as a 'leader' in the field.
and regarding manglement? I had a manager that was gartner this, gartner that, and was patently choosing crap 'solutions' every other week, because he had the attention span of a sugared up two year old. (and that's insulting sugared up two year olds the world over...)
Yeah, paying too much money for recommendations that a fifth grader could do better on. (In fact, I'll listen to a five year old better- that is #12 on the Evil Overlord list, you know.)
Oracle Cloud is horrible. It's like Cloud, but with a bunch of restrictions like "Public IP only (for Private Cloud)"; "Static Routing Peers only" and other similarly annoying and legacy ideas. They seem to give out a very arrogant opinion - that their offering is correct and all else are wrong - on most things, when they seem to be in the minority/niche way of doing things, not the majority/common.
A bit like having Kool Aid rammed down your throat by a zealot, when you wanted Lemonade instead.
AWS is in the lead
Azure is catching up
Google is trying, but needs to put more money in to catch up
Alibaba is to china focused, but if you get all the features is ok
Oracle is paying cursory attention to the market, cos someone said they need a cloud
and IBM is trying and failing with its usual competence
Are these things we need to pay Gartner for?
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