Pricing unpredictability and egress charges are the main problems with Amazon’s S3 object storage, according to GigaOm. But there are plenty of competitive options, the tech analyst firm notes. (And we note that AWS could resolve these pricing issues any time it likes.)
“Hyperscalers (Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba) are direct Amazon AWS competitors and can offer a complete ecosystem,” said GigaOm analyst Enrico Signoretti, while “others focus more narrowly on object storage services and niche markets (Wasabi, BackBlaze, iLand), providing a better user experience and pricing for specific use cases.”
Vendors such as IBM, Oracle, DigitalOcean and Linode present some appealing add-ons and pricing models that can bring down costs and improve application efficiency. Zadara provides a private cloud that covers multiple clouds and the on-premises world.
Signoretti’s findings are published in the new GigaOm Radar for Alternatives to Amazon AWS S3. In the report, he places ten suppliers in a 4-circle, 4-axis, 4-quadrant Radar screen. The arrows project their anticipated direction in the next 12-18 months.
In the Leaders category the top three are Microsoft Azure, Wasabi and Zadara. IBM, Oracle, Google and Alibaba are challengers that may become leaders. The Challengers’ ring includes Backblaze, Linode, iLand. Digital Ocean, a New Entrant, is poised to become a Challenger.
We have gleaned from the report some bullet points on individual vendors, most of which offer S3-compatibility:
- Alibaba is noted as using nearline disk storage to provide good access speed.
- Backblaze is a serious player but is available only in US-West and EU-central regions.
- Digital Ocean uses Ceph, and bucket size might be a problem.
- Google Cloud is a solid option.
- IBM Cloud Object Storage has a differentiated SQL Query feature.
- Iland is focused on backup, archiving, cloud-tiering, and disaster recovery.
- Linode is a three-region supplier for SMBs.
- Azure is well-respected but not S3-compatible.
- Oracle is a compelling service for Oracle customers.
- Wasabi already has more than 18,000 customers.
- Zadara offers storage-as-a-service in 56 regions in 18 countries.
