In the Public Cloud Race, Are Features a Factor?

The public cloud race is fierce, with each provider making new feature announcements on a regular basis. But are these features – especially the minor ones – making a real difference for users? And what do these updates say about where each cloud vendor is heading from an industry perspective?

Let’s look at Amazon as an example.

Amazon Web Services recently announced various new features, including the ability to access its management console across different accounts, EC2 spot instance termination notices, and some enhancements to GovCloud. In terms of impact on cloud users, the new features do add up to a better user experience. For example, getting a two minute notification of a spot instance being deleted is better than nothing. It could help a heavily automated customer to end a job and not lose work. And the single sign on portal pass through for multiple accounts is a nice usability feature. But at the end of the day, none of the recent feature additions really move the needle much for the cloud market as a whole.

Part of the reason for this is because it’s not Amazon’s aim to make changes relevant for every user. They follow good Agile principles, getting features out regularly to customers, and letting them determine which are useful for them. But an Amazon customer is still a special type of cloud user – a true DIYer, someone who is competent and technically capable of learning the AWS way to do things. These features certainly won’t drive a customer considering their cloud vendor to choose Amazon over someone else. But they may help improve the experience of customers already at AWS.

Another question cloud providers have to ask themselves when considering new feature updates is if they will help the company in the face of growing competition – going back to our example, in Amazon’s case, we’re talking about competition from the likes of someone like Google. Viewed in isolation, Amazon’s feature adds are so minor as to be almost irrelevant. But the reality is that Amazon is good at regularly releasing features to the market. When taken en masse, these features actually add up to a lot. And while Google has very good technology, they are very late to the party, and so their usability is way behind. As long as Amazon keeps up the pace, Google may stay behind.

Overall, cloud technologies are maturing, with new feature updates continuing to differentiate them and better define their customer base. The fact that Amazon is releasing (and publicizing) the release of a feature making it easier to login to multiple accounts means that AWS users have multiple accounts, a strong indication of user adoption of cloud, which means more business for the whole market.

But AWS is not right for everyone – it’s highly complex, takes significant time, effort, and skill to learn to use, and support relies very heavily on its knowledge base. For those users who are able to develop and manage their own infrastructure, it’s a fit. But if a company needs more assistance or lacks the required skills, they should choose their technology services provider based on their needs, not based on a cloud features comparison.

It’s also important to keep in mind that, while at first blush it seems Google is taking AWS head on, they may actually be betting on their specialization in HPC and other very targeted workloads, and the usability features that are valuable to an AWS user may not be important at all for a Google user. Going forward, this sort of specialization may have a big impact on cloud buying trends. As the SaaS market grows, cloud offerings will emerge with purpose built infrastructure for particular applications, offering a tailored solution that is optimized for certain workloads, rather than generalized the way most IaaS cloud is sold today. This also drives the conversation about the value of support, as new technologies pose multiple challenges beyond infrastructure and performance, and drive the need for expert assistance and support. From this light, “features” themselves are just one of many factors in the cloud buyer’s choice of provider.

From the long term perspective, especially considering the entire market as a whole, there’s still no clear leader in the cloud services race, and different customers will always have different needs. Only time will tell the importance of the feature factor.

To learn more about Peer 1’s approach to the “feature factor,” check out our cloud hosting options, and stay tuned for more!