We are seeing a shift with enterprise customers views we work with, and through discussions with our peers across the Australian IT industry, there really is a massive increase in the uptake of Azure public cloud. Here we feel are the reasons for this shift:
Licensing – The vast majority of VM’s in the enterprises cloud are still Windows. Yes love it or hate it, enterprises rely on so many COTS (Commercial Of The Shelf) software offerings that just are designed from the vendor to run on Windows servers.
Yes we are seeing a slow shift to more open source typically running on Linux (see more on this below), but this in the Enterprise space will be a slow journey of years. So with the vast majority of your server fleet needing Windows server licenses, guess what, who provides the licenses, yep Microsoft.
The other cloud providers need to purchase these licenses from Microsoft, of course they are not going to be fair in how much they ‘sell on’ these licenses for, it’s one of their market control points. Yes you can start to use your own Microsoft licenses purchased outside the cloud (BYOL), but it is never going to fall down to the level of cost’s directly supplied by Microsoft. Just check out this graphic we found in a slide pack from Microsoft recently to put across this point.
Microsoft is no longer ‘not cool’ – Just 5 years ago, Microsoft was not cool, Microsoft ‘bashing’ was cool though. Microsoft was looked to be the evil corporate giant with too much ‘vendor lock in’. Within the last 5 years we have seen a huge push by Microsoft to embrace open source products and massive support for Linux. In fact at time of writing all of the Azure’s main tools Azure Portal, Azure CLI, now run across Window’s OS’, Linux and Mac.
Azure DevOps announced at Ignite 2018 provides great support for multiple open source CI/CD and build pipelines, even the long standing ‘PowerShell’ now has a Linux/Mac version with ‘PowerShell Core’, and finally look at the Azure marketplace, how many Linux backed VM’s are on there now, tons!
Microsoft has listened to the wider customer base outside of their existing customers. ‘If you want to run Linux, we’ll support you, if you want to run open source, we’ll support you. This ‘open arms’ approach is bringing more and more dev’s and software giants onto the Azure/Microsoft platform. Want to summarise this section “Microsoft is no longer just Windows”.
Three horse (and a donkey) race and their strengths – There seems to an agreed perception forming that out of the 3 horse race between AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), they are gaining a strength in certain areas.
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AWS, strongest in IaaS (Virtual Machines and associated resources) – they’ve been around the longest, started on this and no-one can deny how configurable their IaaS services are, especially if you are running Linux OS’s.
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Azure, strongest in PaaS – We could write an entire separate article on how all the Azure PaaS services are maturing and kicking ass, especially in the areas required for enterprises, security, identity management, access control, secure API access, private VNET integration. Arguably when we finally get away from legacy monolithic applications running on IaaS, the next evolution will be to PaaS (eventually serverless), Azure is leading in our honest opinion in this space.
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Google Cloud Platform (GCP), SaaS – GCP is still the 3rd horse in the race, an emerging into the public cloud space ‘superpower’, don’t underestimate what Google is going to do to the public cloud market when they get going. We see GCP as a ‘volcano of cloud’ ready to erupt with service adoption at some point in the next 2-3 years. But, it will be in the SaaS space we feel their strength will be, the ‘API connected future’ we feel where GCP will be the leader above the other cloud providers.
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Alibaba Cloud (the donkey), the forth and interesting ‘one to watch’, I’m personally not sure how they will market their point of difference going forwards, their current market approach to the western customer is ‘work with us if you want to do business in the huge Asia market’, selling that they will help you cut through the government red tape to do business in the HUGE Asia market. Note: the above isn’t true if you’re an Asia based company, Alibaba Cloud is probably going to be, or already is your ‘default’ cloud provider.
Security, specifically access control – I’m a betting man that 99% of enterprises use Microsoft Active Directory (AD) as their main identity management platform.
It’s been around forever it feels now, and is trusted. Its kept with the times now as well, moving to its online cousin, Azure AD, which supports modern API interaction methods such a Graph API, Single-sign-on (SSO) across multiple OS/browser types, and supports openly widely used 3rd party token systems like OAUTH and SAML.
For the enterprise, integration of applications and supporting infrastructure services remain critical to be smoothly integrated with Active Directory for centralised access control. One of my friends who holds a fairly senior technical role at AWS this week said to me “the main issue we have with enterprises is getting our services to interact with Azure AD, which our customers use”. It’s not going to get any easier for AWS, or any other non-Microsoft cloud provider, as Microsoft invented and owns Active Directory.
The tight (and getting tighter) integration of the Application, OS and cloud management layer into Active Directory and Azure AD will be an ever more powerful security requirement for enterprises, and especially those in the government and financial sectors. Note: AWS Directory Service is effectively an AD managed service running AD behind the scenes, Azure AD is a rewrite of AD in the Azure cloud.
