When it comes to cloud computing vendors, Amazon Web Services — the company that pioneered the market — is still the gold standard.
It has more features, more partners, more customers and more revenue than any other competitor (depending on how you measure it).
Even so, Amazon's cloud isn't perfect.
Industry analyst firm Gartner just released its latest "Magic Quadrant," a market research report which ranks all the top cloud players and analyzes their strengths and weaknesses.
The report finds that AWS is still securely in the dominant position, well ahead of top-ranking rivals Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
"Enterprises make larger annual financial commitments and deploy more mission-critical workloads on AWS than with any other hyperscale provider," the report said.
But it points out that cloud buyers should watch out for three surprising potential whammies when betting on AWS: Prices that can be higher than expected, new features that aren't quite ready for prime time, and Amazon's own reputation as an aggressive competitor.
Where's the price cuts?
The first one pertains to prices: Amazon loves to talk up how it cuts cloud prices by passing along savings to its customers as it finds them.
But, Gartner says, such savings aren't a given.
"For instance, the default and most frequently provisioned storage for AWS's compute service has not experienced a price reduction since 2014, despite falling prices in the market for the raw components," Gartner points out — which is to say that while Amazon is almost certainly paying less for memory to go into the data centers that power AWS, Gartner found that the cost to customers for that particular cloud storage service hasn't budged commensurately.
We'll note that Amazon has cut prices on various storage products over the years, including its major stand-alone computer storage service, S3. The last time it cut S3 prices was in 2016.
But, to Gartner's point, enterprise buyers should still beware when relying on any cloud platform, including on Amazon Web Services. Prices can sometimes be higher than expected. Indeed, there's even a whole range of cost-management tools to help companies keep their cloud spending in check.
Faster isn't always better
Secondly, Gartner warns that in the race to have more offerings than its competitors, AWS sometimes releases new services that aren't all that great yet.
These services either lack important features or don't play well with enough other services and can "need years of substantial engineering updates," Gartner says.
In other words, a new version of a cloud service, even on AWS, can be just as iffy as a 1.0 version of old-fashioned software. While Amazon has a relentless pace of releasing new features — it launched at least 11 new features in 2018 alone — it can sometimes be worth waiting for them to mature.
Swimming with a shark
Finally, Gartner is warning IT pros to keep a wary eye out for Amazon's competitive nature.
The ecommerce and tech giant is constantly entering new markets. Last month, it was the creation its own security-alert management service last month, elbowing its way into to the security information and event management market, known as SIEM. Sometimes, it's something else, in industries like retail, food, health care, furniture and so on.
When Amazon enters a new market, it is an instant threat. Existing players in that market may not want to spend their IT dollars on a competitor that could put them out of business.
The mostly widely known examples are the retail and grocery industries, with major players in both markets running into the open arms of Microsoft.
Examples include Walmart, which calls Microsoft's cloud its "strategic partner" and grocery chain Kroger, which is working with Microsoft to create more retail tech they hope to sell to others.
Gartner writes, "Companies in potentially threatened verticals have directed their IT organizations to avoid the use of AWS."
And that means that any IT leader choosing the AWS cloud "should consider a contingency plan for board-level directives" telling them they have to ditch it, the market researcher warns.
Amazon Web Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
