If Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues growing at its current pace, it will be a $57 billion business by 2020 and a $100 billion business by 2021. Sid Nag, a research director at Gartner, warns that while customers may benefit from cost efficiencies, they should also be vigilant about the influence such service providers might wield over them.
There are also questions as to whether AWS may eventually become “too big to fail.” Canalys founder Steve Brazier commented that “If one of these companies goes down, hundreds of thousands of other companies go down too.”
Alex Woodie explains further why a dominant AWS may not be optimal in this article from Datanami:
However, some analysts have begun wondering whether AWS has gotten so big that it’s beginning to stifle innovation in the market. Some vendors are also taking action in response to the threat. For example, in response to AWS’ success in turning open source technology into profitable businesses, MongoDB, Redis Labs, and Confluent decided in late 2018 to impose additional license requirements on companies that would run one or more parts of their offering in the cloud, with the end result being that their open source software is a bit less open.
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Forrester senior analyst Paul Miller doesn’t see a major threat from AWS that would stifle innovation, at least not yet. “I’m certainly not seeing any evidence of a regulator concern at the moment, particularly because of the speed with which the competition is growing,” Miller tells Datanami.
“AWS is the largest, by far, but Microsoft and Google are growing faster than AWS – granted, from a lower base, but they’re growing faster. Therefore, it would be difficult to make an argument to a regulator that said AWS is monopolistic. They’re not behaving in that fashion at the moment.”That’s not to say that AWS customers should not be concerned by the potential for lock-in. All vendors desire their solutions to be “sticky,” in the sense that customers don’t abandon them, and AWS is no different.
