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Comment by wstrange | Hacker News Reader

I sincerely hope there are a few top cloud providers fighting for market share. An AWS monopoly is not a good thing.

Google has awesome data center technology, and my guess is they have at least as many servers as AWS (even if most of those servers are for internal use). If they are willing to invest for the long term, they can be a credible player.

Microsoft appears to be deeply committed to Azure. As in - we can not lose, we will spend whatever it takes to make this fly. They will also leverage their somewhat captive enterprise customers with Azure / AD integration.

Not clear to me how the rest of the pack will fare.

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We, in our modest way, continue to compete with S3 and Glacier for the purposes of online storage / offsite backups / cloud storage.

Last year (2014) we announced petabyte-scale offsite filesystems[1] that are price-competitive with S3/Glacier.

In fact, we have for many years solved a pain point for (some) customers who run their infrastructure on S3: "my infrastructure is on S3, and my backups are on ... S3 ?" ... and our support of s3tools in our environment makes that very simple.[2]

[1] UNIX based, runs on our ZFS platform with snapshots.

[2] ssh user@rsync.net s3cmd get s3://rsync/mscdex.exe

I've been quite impressed by AWS uptime. I've been looking at Azure - I am cautiously bullish. I'd like to take their services out for a genuine ride, but don't have the time to really invest deeply into exercising them.

They give you $150 credit each month for 3 years upon signing up with bizspark with nothing to pay up front. Surely that justifies taking the time to check it out if you're already curious.

$150/month can't even come close to paying me back for the downtime experienced using Azure. Plus their online console is one of the most useless interfaces I've used.

I am a BizSpark member, and my blog: http://www.devfactor.net is hosted there. I CAN say that when I got ~500k page-views in the last week of December Azure held up fine.

In terms of performance, it is pretty good for the price (free).

My only issue has been the down-time, Its actually been down more than my previous Linux host. I hope MS can figure out how to keep it online a bit more often :)

The time I would spend would be the time writing management code, putting the APIs through their paces, really finding the limits (I do that in some areas of AWS today). Unfortunately, I'd have to be doing that at my day job to really invest the quality time.

I will probably shake out an account and see what it's like for a cookie cutter user. I'm sure the experience is vastly different for a power user.

I've heard Cloud called a trillion-dollar market opportunity. This makes me cautiously optimistic that there will be multiple big players - with that much money at stake, most of the large tech companies can't afford to not bet big on it. Google's Cloud offering hasn't had much uptake, yet, but its existence alone is forcing big price drops on AWS and Azure.

> I've heard Cloud called a trillion-dollar market opportunity.

The term 'cloud' is a LOT of different technology based offerings/markets, which is why it is going to be so big. Compute is inevitable.

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