Cloud competition heating up as Amazon takes aim at VMware

Cloud computing competition is heating up these days, as established players like Amazon look to build on their services while holding off newcomers with big ambitions and fat wallets.

Earlier this month, Amazon announced the AWS Management Portal for vCenter, creating a wave of excitement and surprise that Amazon would so blatantly target the virtualization market leader, VMware Inc. However, the plug-in -- which gave VMware customers the ability to manage Amazon EC2 instances through the vCenter management console -- doesn't really deliver on the doomsday predictions some early speculators suggested.

In this edition of the "This Week in Virtualization" podcast, SearchAWS.com Senior News Writer Beth Pariseau explains why functional limitations to the AWS Management Portal for vCenter make it more of a curiosity than a serious risk to VMware's business. But, that doesn't mean VMware should ignore threats to its business and future in the cloud. A recent analysis by Gartner Inc. put VMware's vCloud Hybrid Service in the "niche players" segment of its 2014 Magic Quadrant for Infrastructure as a Service -- lagging far behind both Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure.

Pariseau and SearchServerVirtualization Assistant Site Editor Ryan Lanigan also talk about the difficulty of calculating cloud computing costs and why you can't simply compare total cost of ownership estimations for cloud computing with in-house virtualization deployments. There must be cases where cloud isn't cheaper, right?