The inexorable march toward the cloud shows no signs of slowing. That’s why vendors of all stripes want to be No. 1, whether it’s in basic cloud infrastructure or specialized cloud services. The big question: Can old hands such as Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp. pull ahead of Amazon Web Services Inc. with their enterprise footholds?

In one lane, the legacy companies are bringing their business-to-business chops to the cloud market, according to John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. In the other, “Google and Amazon have been consumer companies that have bolted on a cloud just to run their operations. So to me, what’s interesting is which one of those sides of the street will emerge as the victorious cloud platform?”

The good money is on the latter, according to Furrier. “I like Google, I like Amazon better than [Microsoft] Azure and Oracle and IBM, mainly because they have consumer experience,” he said. “They understand the ultimate end user and built clouds for that and now are rolling out business.”

The game isn’t over, however, since many factors are at play, and whoever can win over developers and operations teams may ultimately snag the keys to the kingdom.

During today’s AWS Summit in New York City, theCUBE co-host Jeff Frick discussed AWS’ barreling momentum in the modern cloud services market and how competitors might erect speed bumps in its path. 

Crunching numbers and betting on DevOps

If publicly available numbers are to be trusted, AWS is still king in cloud. However, Microsoft is making sizable gains. “The analysts that are looking at market share, I think, are looking at old data,” Furrier said. “It’s hard to know who’s really winning when you talk about revenue, because everyone can bundle in revenue — for instance, Microsoft bundles Office revenue in.”

AWS conferences continue to expand drastically year over year. For instance, the AWS Summit in NYC — a regional event — drew about 10,000 attendees. “It’s now looking the size of what re:Invent was just a few years ago,” Furrier said.

These are still early days for cloud, however. “What’s amazing is that even though pretty much every enterprise has something going on in the public cloud, in terms of the vast majority of their workloads, still most of them are not,” Frick said.

AWS competitors could turn things around if they serve real-world users what they want, he added.

“You’re starting to see that interplay between operators and developers working together, but yet decoupled,” Furrier said. These personas are changing the way work gets done, and they’ll influence the cloud market.

Here’s the complete analysis, part of extensive coverage of the AWS Summit by SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:

Photo: Amazon Web Services