The Most Important Factor to Consider When Choosing A Cloud Platform

The Cloud is a Mainstream Technology

Last year the combined total of Amazon, Microsoft, Google and IBM cloud platforms revenue was $56.1 billion. It's common knowledge that there are many benefits to migrating or building your server and IT infrastructure using a cloud platform such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or IBM Cloud.

For each of the mentioned cloud platforms the narrative goes something like:

"We at <Cloud Provider> originally built these cloud technologies to empower and scale the very services such as <List of products and services Cloud Provider is known for> used by everyone in the world. Now you have access to them too!"

"Your Accounting Department wants the cloud because it trades capital expenditures for predictable operational expenditures."

"Your SysOps and DevOps want the cloud so they can build out secure, highly available and infinitely scalable infrastructure to run your business applications."

"Your Software Developers and Software Engineers want the cloud because it allows them to focus on building your products and services, and not troubleshooting infrastructure issues."

Does it Matter Which Platform I Choose?

These are convincing benefits of deploying your infrastructure to the cloud, but these benefits apply to any of the aforementioned cloud platforms. When you evaluate each cloud platform's server and IT infrastructure products spanning: Compute, Networking, Data Ingestion, Database, and Storage. It is difficult to find any groundbreaking difference between them.

But a cloud platform is the embodiment of thousands of technologies manifested as hundreds of products and services. Server and IT infrastructure represent only a portion of the total offerings.

Moving to The Cloud isn't the Paradigm Shift. It's the Start of One.

Analytics and Machine Learning is the next step in the cloud evolution, and it is where the groundbreaking differences between cloud platforms will be. The differences significant enough to make you chose one cloud platform over another.

Cloud 1.0 is about developing secure, highly available, and globally scalable products and services. It is about generating and collecting data and metrics. Cloud 1.0 has got businesses comfortable with the idea of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

Cloud 2.0 is about leveraging the data to enabling businesses to make better decisions and developing intelligent products and services. Cloud 2.0 ushers in the era of Intelligence-as-a-Service and the ability for your systems to see, hear, and understand!

Follow me as I explore and distill the pertinent information around the Analytics and Machine Learning offerings of AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM Cloud in a series of articles to follow.

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