Enterprise includes cloud services. People stuck with using Microsoft stuff due to legacy issues will be setting up their Windows Servers in the cloud instead of on physical boxes, and VPN for security. While it's true Microsoft is spending vast sums of money on cloud infrastructure, most of the rest of their businesses are dismal at best. The one exception is XBox. This chart doesn't include AWS PaaS for some reason. AWS dominates because people are running Linux instances and AWS is better suited for that than the others. Also, Amazon basically stole Rackspace as parter away from Microsoft recently.
AWS dominates because they were first to the party and committed - Bezos understood quickly that he can abstract all the investment he made for running Amazon.com and create clear interfaces to it - to let people run whatever they want on it. They had a 4 year head start that happened to happen at the exact same time that the mobile revolution happened and people needed a back-end that was easy to deploy if you did not have a lot of investment in a server room. Deploying a Linux VM on Azure is a one button click, just as it is a one button click to deploy a Linux VM on AWS. The reason AWS is ahead has nothing to do with Linux availability, it is all the other services that they have around it that removes some of the pain points of managing your back-end. They had NoSQL cloud service way before anyone other than maybe Google, but you had to use only Google tools to access it at the start with Google, they had queue services a lot earlier than anyone - AWS just has tons of stuff that is integrated - and for many years, if you did not want to manage all these services yourself - they were the only game in town. Sure, you could run your own NoSQL or RDS instances on your own AMI - and install queue services and BI services - what AWS gave you is the ability to deploy AMIs for just your own code and have all these services already running and available via simple APIs. I really think you give way too much importance to the "Compute" portion of the cloud offering - AWS is successful because they were first to commit and were smart enough to look for the pain points and try to remove them by offering no-setup services.
Only 20% of instances on Azure are Linux. They're effectively catering to Microsoft shops that are too deeply invested in the tech over the years to get out and into something better. AWS is successful because they offer the best quality of service and the richest feature set. Consider I tried hosting SportsTwo on Digital Ocean, and that lasted for just a few days. The service was crap. Now it's on AWS in the Oregon facility and running like a top. The thought of using Azure never once entered my mind. It wasn't at all a consideration. I wanted the cadillac of services. Nothing but the best.
I am not fighting with anything about AWS being better than Azure for general use - we use it as well, I just do not think that AWS is chosen because of Linux support. We had Linux machines running on Azure - and it was easy to set up and the machines ran fine - there is really nothing in the "compute" side of the cloud that make AWS better than Azure because of Linux support. Nothing. There are more instance types on AWS and there are pre-defined AMIs that you can use as a starting point - which is nice, but again, this is really not the reason you choose AWS over other stuff. AWS is the best all-around public cloud platform because they have more services to just ease your pain points. Microsoft is not there (although they are better than Google/IBM etc...) - but they do have some things going for them - moving legacy Windows is definitely one, I believe that as far as raw power for super-huge apps with needs for tons of resources is another place where they are better (probably because of their experience running these huge games for XBox One and running the deep-learning and prediction engines for Bing). Finally anyone that wants a hybrid cloud solution - so mission critical and secure data remains in house is likely to choose Azure over AWS - they simply have a lot more to sell in this area. If I remember correctly, as quick as AWS is growing - Azure actually grew faster last year, at least from a revenue point. BTW - let's avoid the Cadillac of ... references, I do not think that AWS want to be associated with a company that can make some great products but has real problems selling them.
The HOST OS on all those AWS physical machines is Redhat LINUX. And Xen hypervisor. Millions of servers. I'm pretty sure Azure runs in some variety of Windoze. http://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-ec2-cloud-is-made-up-of-almost-half-a-million-linux-servers/ Edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Azure Microsoft Azure has been described as a "cloud layer" on top of a number of Windows Server systems, which use Windows Server 2008 and a customized version of Hyper-V, known as the Microsoft Azure Hypervisor to provide virtualization of services
An article by forbes says AWS is 10x bigger than Azure. And they estimate Azure revenues at $125M a quarter. And... http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2015/04/15/sizing-microsoft-azure-and-amazon-aws-revenue/ Deutsche Bank predicts that AWS will maintain its overwhelming lead in cloud infrastructure services over Microsoft Azure, Google, IBM and others. This is based on scale of operations and AWS’s success in moving “up the stack” to premium services. The researchers found Microsoft too tethered to the Microsoft stack to challenge the scale of AWS today, and a more open approach to third party technologies including Red Hat Linux have the potential to become growth catalysts.
