Alibaba An AWS Threat? Not Quite

A recent Seeking Alpha article proposes the theory that Alibaba could threaten Amazon’s AWS cloud services.

Amazon has been my best investment by far.

The article has some great information about the cloud services industry. It includes a lot of facts and figures that ring true. I disagree with this article’s overall assessment, however.

Alibaba will erode AWS market share in Asia but few other regions. They are a Chinese company. I would never use them myself nor recommend the Alibaba cloud solution to my clients because of this.

China has a history of banning content and restricting the free flow of information — especially on the Internet. Shutting down a business on the Alibaba cloud and taking over the assets of anything they deem “inappropriate” or “propaganda” is well within the realm of possibility. Why would any business add that to their risk factors when you have AWS as an alternative.

Not too mention Amazon continues to innovate and introduce services at a dizzying pace. The dollars spent on investment only matters if it yields results. Based on the service offerings alone, Amazon is 10 times further ahead in this space than the closest competitor.

I’m maintaining a hold position on AMZN despite the growing popularity of Azure, Google Cloud, and Alibaba.

seekingalpha.com/article/4202935-amazons-aws-faces-another-threat