After the article The Amazon Web Services are the measure of all things in the Cloud Computing market! we should answer the question if the Amazon Web Services (AWS) are the standard of the Cloud as well.
The Amazon Web Services are actual and undisputed the market leader in the field of the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider and cover all segments and capabilities of Cloud Computing so far.
Due to the long-standing experience Amazon has a significant advance before all other provider in this segment. The expertise arosed by setting up a Private Cloud to fulfill the claims of their own infrastructure (scalability of the Amazon webshop etc.), from what finally the Public Cloud services (Amazon Web Services) originated.
First of all we can select from a variety of „standards“, because every provider attempt to seek his proprietary solution as a standard in the market. Therefore we cannot assume that the Amazon Web Services are the standard of the Cloud. Moreover a standard needs a certain period to become a standard.
So, what are the evidences, that the Amazon Web Services are already the standard respectively the coming standard of Cloud Computing?
A view on the current offerings of third-party suppliers in the Cloud Computing market shows that AWS has a high significance. Most of all Amazons storage service Amazon S3 is very popular. With JungleDisk, CloudBerry S3 Explorer, CloudBerry Backup or Elephant Drive are certain clients available to transfer the data from your local PC or server into the Amazon Cloud. Moreover, with S3 Curl, S3cmd or S3 Sync further open source solutions are available which implements the Amazon S3 API and can be use to store the data in the Amazon Cloud.
A further obvious evidence for the Amazon Web Services to become the Cloud Computing standard is the offering of the German Cloud Computing provider ScaleUp Technologies. They are offering a Cloud Storage, which fully implements and adopts the Amazon S3 API.
In addition, with Eucalyptus respectively the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud „Clones“ of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) are available, with them it is possible to build an own Private Cloud along the lines of EC2. With the Euca2ools you already find an adaption of the EC2 API.
If you take a look on the list of the AWS Solution Provider, you also see the current importance of AWS.
Not each AWS product has the current potential to referred as a standard. In my mind, just the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) as well as the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) can be regarded as a standard.
Based on the current offerings and adoptions you can see that S3 is widely used and recognized and it must be assumed that further third-party suppliers will jump on the bandwagon. Moreover, most of the providers will refrain from reinventing the wheel. AWS was the first provider in the IaaS Cloud Computing market and had, as a result, enough time to popularize their proprietary standards. Furthermore, the remain big providers missed to trail quick and to present their own offerings. If they wait any longer, the time will decide for AWS’s benefit.
Amazon S3 is the current defacto standard in the field of Cloud storage. Probably Amazon EC2 will trace shortly and establish oneself. If and when the remaining AWS offerings also become a defacto standard remains to be seen.
