“To know your Enemy, you must become your Enemy.” ― Sun Tzu
Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure crown VMware as undisputed leader in 2014:
Source: Gartner (July 2014)
In the leader quadrant, VMware (ESXi) is followed by Microsoft (Hyper-V), all others being either challengers, either niche players.
If we are talking about Cloud Infrastructure As A Service 2014, the crown belongs to Amazon Web Services:
Source: Gartner (May 2014)
Looks an AWS vs. Microsoft battle, with AWS winner. VMware is still Niche Player despite the launch with fanfare of vCloud Hybrid Services last year.
Interesting fact, AWS uses Xen, an open-source hypervisor. Xen /ˈzɛn/ has been supported originally by XenSource Inc., and since 2007 (after the acquisition of XenSource) by Citrix which claims that Xen Project and XenServer power over 80 percent of public clouds today. Beside Amazon which uses Xen Project Hypervisor for the AWS platform, the XenServer service provider customers include Rackspace, 1&1 Internet, SoftLayer and Korea Telecom.
Interesting as well is who is using AWS? A lot of start-ups as well big names like Adobe, Citrix or Novartis. On Amazon’s Case Studies page, we can see also Netflix, Expedia, Reddit, Pinterest.
That being said, it makes sense to describe AWS as “overwhelmingly the dominant vendor” by Gartner.
So, what is AWS?
Amazon Web Services offers a broad set of global compute, storage, database, analytics, application, and deployment services that help organizations move faster, lower IT costs, and scale applications.
In other words, AWS is a cloud services platform that offers over the internet compute power, storage, content delivery, and others.
There are two well-known products at the core of AWS:
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud
- Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web.
To help new customers get started, AWS offers a free usage tier. The free tier can be used one year for: launch new applications, test existing applications in the Cloud, or simply gain hands-on experience with AWS.
Let’s get it started
It takes less than 10 min to set-up an AWS account. Then, with magic and five clicks in another 5 min you get a new Windows 2012 R2 Server:
Pretty cool, huh?
