I honestly have to say I have never seen such a clean and thorough comparison between two cloud platforms – would’ve loved to see Google Cloud thrown in but then the compare may have run 10,000 words. From Kinsta, AWS vs Azure in 2021 (Comparing the Cloud Computing Giants): “The cloud computing industry has grown rapidly, exploding into a vast array of cloud providers, technologies, products, and services. Even a simple cloud deployment offers hundreds of options. It’s strange to say, but it’s an issue of too much choice! […] To complicate things further, many providers use unique terminologies for similar offerings. The same tech will have different names, muddling like-for-like feature comparisons. Hence, you need a guide to help make difficult decisions simple.” It’s a great breakdown of everything from security to single sign-on to file systems to pricing.

Speaking from personal experience, Azure’s ease of use is a huge winner, and because of that we are seeing cloud aggregators like Cloudways, and managed WordPress hosts like Convesio tackle the problem with great success. Abstracting the complexity, pricing, and support from the like of AWS and Google Cloud are huge advantages.

I believe that the more and more we push commoditized cloud infrastructures, here’s looking at AWS and Google, into the background end users just won’t care. It’s like mobile network operators, yes we can talk about differences but we all expect our phones to at least be able to make a call and have some level of internet these days. AWS/GC are relegating themselves to that piece of the overall web. Not that that won’t make them insane revenue but Azure’s take is where everyone should be heading. Make on-boarding easier and easier, make pricing clearer and clearer, and make support meaningful.

I’ve listed only a few companies above but let’s be clear, fewer and fewer hosts are actually building out infrastructure they own, so most end users are sitting on top of one of the big three cloud providers anyway. There needs to be some value added to the mix. The reductions of friction in administration are key but what are the next steps? Get ready for an expanded discussion of the professional services market upheaval at hosts look to find new markets of opportunity.