AWS Outage Puts It Farther Behind Microsoft, Google Cloud, Oracle

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I discuss the recent AWS outage,
identifying five reasons that this outage will significantly
impact the company's reputation.


Highlights


00:30 — AWS experienced a big outage this week,
impacting multiple companies and services at a time when AWS,
relative to its hyperscaler competitors, is in a decline. I think
there are five core reasons that its reputation will suffer from
this outage.


01:15 — The magnitude of the outage will greatly
impact the company's reputation. There is an enormous range of
business customers directly affected by this, reaching millions
of people across multiple industries.


01:50 — There's never a "good" time for events
like this to occur, but this outage happened at the beginning of
the holiday season. In the minds of many business leaders, this
season is where they get a large percentage of their annual
revenue through online services. With this disaster, can AWS be
fully trusted?


02:30 — AWS is the slowest-growing hyperscaler.
In a vacuum, it reached nearly $31 billion in revenue with a
17.5% growth rate in Q2. However, AWS is growing at a much slower
rate compared to its hyperscaler competitors — Microsoft, Google
Cloud, and Oracle.


03:37 — AWS also has the slowest-growing RPO or
backlog. AWS reported its backlog up to 25% to almost $200
billion. Again, in the world of the vacuum, that's terrific. But
relative to the others, this wasn't very good at all.


04:38 — This outage came at a time when the
other hyperscalers are distinguishing themselves with powerful AI
strategies and services. AWS has had some AI properties but not
at the scale of Microsoft with Copilot and ChatGPT, Google Cloud
with the launch of Gemini Enterprise, and Oracle with its Oracle
Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).


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