Amazon Web Services Inc. is the undisputed king of cloud, but competitor Google Cloud Platform is steadily winning developer fans. Do those developers have the clout to tip the buying decisions of businesses in GCP’s favor?

“If you’re going to attack Amazon right now, you can’t do the breadth of services,” said Jerry Chen (pictured), partner at Greylock Management Corp.

Amazon’s cloud service releases more than double every year because its business model and customer base make it cost-effective, according to Chen. Any cloud company that wants to catch up to AWS’ rapid release cycle will be left panting in exhaustion before long.

“You’ve got to figure out a different vector of attacking,” Chen said. He spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Winning ‘developer love’

One effective way to gain cloud market share is to “win developer love,” Chen said. This was, after all, key to AWS’ ascent, and it is now helping GCP grow. “They’re really doing a concentrated attack around some of their data and [machine learning] services, TensorFlow, and what not, that’s getting a lot of attention,” Chen explained.

AWS executives aren’t dumb, though; they too know how attractive to developers machine learning for big data is. Many new AWS announcements around machine learning and data services are forthcoming, according to Chen.

Is the path to enterprise execs and their checkbooks through the fingers of coders? Yes and no, Chen stated. “You start with the developers. They’re going to build the apps; they’re going to make the decisions about what technologies they use,” he said. However, that is not the finish line. “To get sticky, you need security, operations, IT [information technology],” he added.

Ultimately, chief information officers and chief executive officers will be the ones to weigh the cost and lock-in potential of these foundational elements, Chen stated. “You build a house, but someone’s going to pay for it, and that’s going to be the C-suite,” Chen said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent.

Photo: SiliconANGLE