With the first half of 2018 coming to a close it's worth revisiting the cloud battle to see how the year is shaping up.
The pecking order outlined in our top cloud providers of 2018[1] hasn't changed, but there are clearly moving parts worth pondering.
With that take in mind, let's go through the year (so far) in cloud computing[2].
The field narrows dramatically. Gartner landed with its Magic Quadrant and basically whittled the IaaS market down to a big three in leadership[3]. Not surprisingly, those three were AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, which broke into the leadership quadrant. What was surprising is that Gartner thinks only 6 cloud infrastructure players matter--AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, Alibaba Cloud and Oracle.
IBM expands its footprint. Yes, IBM was rated more of a niche player by Gartner. However, IBM did create 18 new availability zones globally[4] in a move that may enable it to play a bit of catch up. With a focus on hybrid deployments, IBM Cloud occupies a unique space but needs to juice its as-a-service revenue growth to keep pace.
Cutting edge as a service. AWS has made its DeepLens camera available to developers[5]. The move is an interesting test bed for machine learning on edge devices. Also note that AWS also pushed to GA[6] its AR platform dubbed Sumerian[7].
Developers, developers, developers. Microsoft and Google made their big pitches to developers [8]with Build and I/O[9], respectively. And cloud was a thread throughout along with AI. Microsoft made it clear that it