Thread by @QuinnyPig

It's geometry homework! It's a SWOT analysis! No, it's the 2021 @Gartner_inc Magic Quadrant® for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services! Let's make fun of it.

It goes alphabetically and thus begins with @alibaba_cloud. "Strong in China," "actually makes money" and whatever the hell this is count as their strengths.

Cautions for @alibaba_cloud are "weak in not-China," "local competitors and also geopolitics," and "lack of transparency" that includes both discounting and technical details of service implementations.

Next up we have @awscloud. Strengths include "they buy a lot of components so their supply chain is solid," "companies make large financial commitments to them," and "leader in innovation" because someone at @gartner_inc really trusts the re:Invent keynote slide deck.

Cautions for @awscloud include "sales pressure to increase commitment by 20% in order to renew existing contracts" which... isn't particularly new to us?

This is how Gartner says "perhaps 17 ways to run containers on AWS is a few too many:"

And the last caution is "services are bare-bones at launch." This includes IaaS and managed databases create a misleading halo effect for other offerings such as @awscloud Outposts, which have only experienced "modest traction." Ouch. Burn.

Next we have @googlecloud! Strengths include "increasing revenue," "growing enterprise mindshare," and whatever the hell "innovation velocity" is. They get special mention for how fully featured their Kubernetes service offering is.

The @googlecloud weaknesses are "postsales customer satisfaction is crap," "they're offering huge discounts but don't expect them to last," and "they lose breathtaking amounts of money every year."

Next up is @IBMcloud. Hoo doggy, let's take on our first Niche Player.

Strengths include "corporate restructuring," "focusing on regulated industries who can't easily leave," and "edge computing" because they were really stretching for a third strength.

Cautions include "market share" which is sad, "competitive pressure" since other vendors are a lot more nimble, and "clients view IBM as a legacy provider" because despite a large marketing budget, customers still in fact have eyes.

Next on the list is @azure. @gartner_inc identified strengths as being "broadly appealing" across the gamut--and tag in Visual Studio (they probably mean VS Code) and GitHub as examples of this. Also strong enterprise relations, and data services adoption.

Cautions include "#hugops is great but @azure feels like it breaks all the time," "your licensing is actively customer hostile with its complexity," and "lack of novel innovations." @Gartner_inc is not pulling punches on this one.

Next up, @OracleCloud! Strengths include "Market Responsiveness" which means "they're catching up quickly," "all of Oracle's aaS services are dogfooding OCI," and "distributed cloud" which is a full on-prem set of every cloud offering--that one's unique in the industry.

Cautions for @oraclecloud include "nascent adoption" because so many capabilities are new (and Oracle customers aren't that quick to adopt new things), "people despise Oracle as a company," and "heavy focus on lift-and-shift of existing Oracle workloads."

Next @Gartner_inc puts its two cents in on @tencentcloud. Strengths include "Digital Transformation" with just boilerplate, "Large Deployments" because large Chinese banks use them, and "Investments" which grasps at the "they have a region in Russia" straw.

Cautions for @tencent include "International presence" because 1/3 of regions are operated by a partner; 2/3 of regions have one AZ.

"Regional Disparity" because only the regions in China have all the bells and whistles.

And "Narrow Ecosystem" because MSPs rarely support them

Okay then--that's the runthrough. No vendors were added or dropped this year.

Here's the list of what you must offer in order to to be included in this list:

The good folks at @gartner_inc note that 90% of worldwide public cloud is concentrated in just four providers. They're keeping an eye on China though.

I suspect the actual adoption stories here are "people mostly want VMs and a couple of other baseline offerings."

And that more or less sums up the report; it's briefer than in previous years.

Remember, when you're in high school you make your decisions based upon what the cool kids say; once you grow up that doesn't change, the cool kids just now all work at @gartner_inc.

I'm Corey Quinn; more analysis on this market to come in a week or so at @LastWeekinAWS; subscribe now if you haven't already because although @Gartner_inc doesn't evaluate on this criteria, we have a platypus who reads your letters.