What Makes AWS (Amazon Web Services) the Market Leader in Cloud Services?

To reduce the effect of outages and maintain the robustness of the system, Amazon Web Services is geologically expanded into regions, which have central hubs in the Western and Eastern US, Ireland, Brazil, Japan, Singapore and Australia. Every area consists of multiple smaller geographic regions, known as availability zones.

You can avail over 36 services through the AWS Collection:

• CloudDrive: It allows users to access and upload documents, videos, music, and photos from any device that can be connected to the web. Users can also use CloudDrive to stream music on any device
• ElastiCache: It works as an inclusive caching service. ElastiCache is also compliant with Memcached
• CloudSearch: It is a scalable search service which integrates customized search functionalities into other applications
• Elastic Compute Cloud: Using this service, businesses subscribers can conveniently run apps. It efficiently serves as a broad set of virtual machines
• Dynamo Database: This is a fully-managed NoSQL database service and is popular for scalability and latencies
• Mechanical Turk: Using this interface, developers can incorporate human intelligence in Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs), enabling users to complete tasks that their devices are not otherwise made for
• Simple Storage Service: A low cost and high-speed service that is specifically designed for archiving of application programs, data, and online backup.

All of the above AWS offerings are charged according to usage and rates vary for each service.

Why is it the Undisputed Leader in the Cloud Services Market?

Prior to the launch of AWS, if anybody wanted to utilize computing power and storage online, they had to pay for server time to do so. The process involved tracking down a server provider, choosing the type of machine that worked for you and paying for the whole thing. Naturally, that led to a host of problems. In case a large audience visited your site all at once, it was sure to crash. In case you leased or bought a large server to cater to all of them, you had to pay for the power you were not using.

Therefore, AWS has turned the tables by offering over 70 services to allow customers to run their entire or part of internet operations from servers located in AWS data centers across the globe. The future looks bright for enterprises with analytics, databases, storage and the Internet of Things that are likely to shape the internet.

Customers also include GE and Netflix that pay for all services as they use them by subtracting or adding resources as required. AWS has now become a powerful revenue generator and offers flexibility that is on a completely new level. Interestingly, numerous competitors have also claimed a share of this huge market. Microsoft is directing all its research and development (R&D) efforts to Microsoft Azure. Its cloud product offers a similar set of products related to infrastructure, networking, and storage.

However, not even the toughest rivals can doubt the recent success of Amazon Web Services. Google is relatively new to the cloud game compared to Microsoft Azure and AWS. However, they did not waste any time in proving themselves a practical IaaS competitor. The Google cloud platform is already a hit and has successfully secured many large customers in a few years. Although rivals are experimenting with several options to stay in the game, they are yet to score a genuine hit as AWS continues to dominate in terms of revenue growth and market share.

Final Thoughts

Owing to a consistently aggressive pricing strategy, Amazon has cut the cost of services roughly 50 times since its initiation in 2006. As technology continues to progress, Amazon Web Services has managed to dominate the market share and maintain an impressive customer base for upsells.