Table of Contents
- Summary
- Market Categories
- Key Criteria Comparison
- GigaOm Radar
- Vendor Insights
- Analyst’s Take
- Methodology
- About Joep Piscaer
- About GigaOm
- Copyright
1. Summary
Organizations today look to the cloud for their compute and data storage needs, embracing the public cloud for newly built cloud-native applications and migrated legacy applications alike.
Choosing the right cloud provider is a non-trivial, often business critical decision.Long-term technical and financial lock-in can negatively impact organizational agility, impeding a business’s ability to respond to and act on changing requirements. Scalability, performance, resilience, security, and other non-functional requirements are the order of the day, and cloud vendors need to do it all.
While utility compute services and their adjacent storage (block and file) and networking services (firewalls and load balancing) make up the core technological tenet of any cloud, organizations are looking to simplify and outsource common aspects of their environments higher up the proverbial stack—most notably: Kubernetes, databases, and security.
Kubernetes’s rising popularity means that customers are mindful of the freedom that its inherent portability brings and they want to be free from lock-in by any individual cloud provider. Containers are portable across public clouds and other environments, so customers are evaluating alternatives and more open cloud ecosystems for storage and compute.
Open-source initiatives and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) are instrumental in executing the vision of portable, flexible, and agile hybrid-cloud strategies, making applications and their data both portable and cloud-agnostic—for the most part. Standardization, integration, and ecosystem interoperability are key evaluation metrics when comparing cloud vendors.
Three vendors—Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP)—dominate the market, often referred to as the “big three” hyperscalers or public cloud vendors. However, not all organizations, and not all workloads, are a natural fit for the big three public cloud vendors, based on a variety of factors such as the complexity of the product portfolio, price point, regional availability of services, and competitive restrictions.
There are other utility compute services that offer a wide range of compute, storage, and networking services across geographically dispersed locations that may be a better fit in these cases. These cloud providers offer specific advantages over the big three public cloud vendors, including simpler product portfolios, a range of pricing models and pricing points, local support or personnel presence, in-person implementation and customer success services, local or edge data centers, or solutions for specific niche use cases.
This report focuses on those alternative service providers that offer ubiquitously available, scalable, elastic, multitenant pools of compute resources and adjacent compute, storage, and networking services in an on-demand, self-service manner, billed as a measured service.
This GigaOm Radar report highlights vendors offering hyperscale compute alternatives and equips IT decision-makers with the information needed to select the best fit for their business and use case requirements. In the corresponding GigaOm report “Key Criteria for Evaluating Hyperscale Compute Alternatives,” we describe in more detail the capabilities and evaluation metrics that are used to evaluate vendors in this market.
How to Read this Report
This GigaOm report is one of a series of documents that helps IT organizations assess competing solutions in the context of well-defined features and criteria. For a fuller understanding, consider reviewing the following reports:
Key Criteria report: A detailed market sector analysis that assesses the impact that key product features and criteria have on top-line solution characteristics—such as scalability, performance, and TCO—that drive purchase decisions.
GigaOm Radar report: A forward-looking analysis that plots the relative value and progression of vendor solutions along multiple axes based on strategy and execution. The Radar report includes a breakdown of each vendor’s offering in the sector.
Solution Profile: An in-depth vendor analysis that builds on the framework developed in the Key Criteria and Radar reports to assess a company’s engagement within a technology sector. This analysis includes forward-looking guidance around both strategy and product.