The capability gap between hyperscale cloud providers has begun to narrow; however, fierce competition for enterprise workloads extends to secondary markets worldwide. Infrastructure and operations leaders should evaluate cloud providers with a broad range of use cases and a wide market presence.

Market Definition/Description

Cloud computing is a style of computing in which scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service using internet technologies. Cloud infrastructure and platform services (CIPS) are defined as standardized, highly automated offerings, in which infrastructure resources (e.g., compute, networking and storage) are complemented by integrated platform services. These include managed application, database and functions as-a-service offerings. The resources are scalable and elastic in near-real time and are metered by use. Self-service interfaces are exposed directly to the customer, including a web-based user interface (UI) and an API. The resources may be single-tenant or multitenant, and can be hosted by a service provider or on-premises in the customer’s data center.The scope of this Magic Quadrant has changed, compared with its predecessor, the “Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service.” Gartner has developed this Magic Quadrant to reflect the changing dynamics of cloud services offered and the ways that enterprise customers adopt them. Ultimately, hyperscale cloud providers, and the broad array of services they offer beyond infrastructure as a service (IaaS), have found strategic importance in Gartner’s enterprise clients and the Magic Quadrant needed to evolve to reflect as much.The scope of the Magic Quadrant for CIPS includes IaaS and integrated platform as a service (PaaS) platforms. These include application PaaS (aPaaS), functions as a service (FaaS), database PaaS (dbPaaS), application developer PaaS (adPaaS) and industrialized private cloud offerings that are often deployed in enterprise data centers.

Understanding the Vendor Profiles, Strengths and Cautions

CIPS providers that target enterprise and midmarket customers generally offer high-quality service, with excellent availability, good performance, high security and good customer support. Exceptions will be noted in this Magic Quadrant’s evaluations of individual providers. When we say “all providers,” we specifically mean “all the evaluated providers included in this Magic Quadrant,” not all CIPS providers in general. Keep the following in mind when reading the vendor profiles:

• All the providers have public cloud IaaS and PaaS offerings. Most also offer, or are in the process of building, industrialized private cloud offerings, in which every customer is on standardized infrastructure and cloud management tools. In some cases, the provider’s industrialized, on-premises offering may share similarities to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), but tethered to the cloud. However, this may not resemble the provider’s public cloud service in architecture or quality. A single architecture and feature set and cross-cloud management, for both public and private CIPS, make it easier for customers to combine and migrate across service models as their needs dictate. They also enable the provider to use its engineering investments more effectively. Gartner is beginning to describe the notion of cloud-provider-managed infrastructure, wherever it may exist, as “ distributed cloud.”
• All the providers target midmarket businesses and enterprises, as well as other companies that use technology at scale. Some of the providers may also target small businesses and startups. Just because a provider targets a segment, however, does not necessarily mean that it is well-suited to that segment’s needs. Furthermore, not all providers have the capacity to serve very-large-scale customers, and some have capacity constraints in particular regions.
• All the providers offer basic cloud IaaS — compute, storage and networking resources as a service. They also offer additional value-added capabilities, notably cloud software infrastructure services — typically middleware and databases as a service — including PaaS capabilities. These services, along with IT operations management (ITOM) capabilities as a service (especially DevOps-related services), are a vital differentiator in the market, especially for Mode 2 agile IT buyers.
• All the providers claim to have high security standards. However, the extent of the security controls provided to customers varies significantly. All the providers evaluated can offer solutions that will meet common regulatory compliance needs, unless otherwise noted. All the providers have undergone SOC 1, SOC 2 and SOC 3 audits, as well as SSAE 16, ISO/IEC 27001, ISO/IEC 27017 and ISO/IEC 27018 audits. This provides a relatively high level of assurance that the providers are adhering to generally accepted practices for the security of their systems, but it does not address the extent of controls offered to customers.
• Security is a shared responsibility. Customers need to correctly configure controls, and they may need to supply additional controls beyond what their providers offer. Furthermore, providers vary in their degree of transparency as to how services are architected, although customers typically have access to third-party assessment reports under a nondisclosure agreement (NDA).

• Monthly compute availability service-level agreements (SLAs) of 99.95% and higher are generally the norm. They are typically higher than availability SLAs for managed hosting. Service credits for outages in a given month are typically capped at 100% of the monthly bill; however, some providers have caps as low as 25%. This availability percentage is typically non-negotiable, because it is based on an engineering estimate of the underlying infrastructure reliability.
• Single-instance compute SLAs have become common for providers in this Magic Quadrant. It might be more accurate to say that there are usually two SLAs — one for the compute service, and one for individual instances. Some providers have a compute availability SLA that requires customers to use compute capabilities in at least two fault domains (sometimes known as “availability zones” or the like).
• Many providers have additional SLAs. These cover network availability and performance, customer service responsiveness and other service aspects.
• Infrastructure resources are not normally automatically replicated into multiple data centers. Customers are responsible for their own business continuity. Some providers offer optional disaster recovery solutions.
• All providers offer per-second metering of virtual machines (VMs). Some can offer shorter metering increments, which can be more cost-effective for short-term batch jobs. Unless otherwise noted, providers charge on a per-VM basis.
• Providers are increasingly offering bare-metal physical servers on a dynamic basis. These are priced by the second. Providers with a bare-metal option are noted as such.
• All the providers partner with carrier-neutral colocation exchanges. This enables customers to obtain connectivity from a variety of carriers that are located in these facilities. In addition, many customers require a small amount of supplemental colocation in low-latency proximity with their cloud provider. For example, they may have a large-scale database, specialized network equipment or legacy equipment, such as a mainframe.
• Some providers offer software marketplaces. In these marketplaces, software vendors specially license and package their software to run on that provider’s cloud IaaS offering. Marketplace software can be automatically installed, and can be billed through the provider, although the software vendor often provides support.
• All providers offer enterprise-class support with 24/7 customer service. This is provided via phone, email and chat, along with an account manager. Some offer a lower level of support, but allow customers to pay extra for enterprise-class support.
• All the providers will sign contracts with customers, can invoice and can consolidate bills from multiple accounts. All providers offer online sign-up and credit card billing, because they recognize that enterprise buyers prefer contracts and invoices. Some will sign “zero dollar” contracts that do not commit a customer to a certain volume.
• Some providers will sign a U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act Business Associate Agreement (HIPAA BAA).
• Unless otherwise noted, all providers will sign the following contract addendums:
  • An EU Data Protection Directive (95/46/EC) data-processing agreement (DPA), which includes the model clauses
  • An EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) DPA
• Managed and professional services are an optional but important accelerator for customer success. Almost all providers rely heavily on managed service providers (MSPs) and system integration (SI) partners for these services. However, most providers offer their own first-party professional services and some also offer first-party managed services offerings.
• All of the evaluated providers offer a portal, documentation, technical support, customer support and contracts in English. Some can provide one or more of these in languages other than English. Most providers can conduct business in local languages.

The service provider descriptions are accurate as of the time of publication. Our technical evaluation of service features took place between January 2020 and March 2020.

Format of the Vendor Descriptions

When describing each provider, we first summarize the nature of the company, then provide information about its industrialized cloud IaaS offerings in the following format:

• Locations: Cloud data center locations by country, languages in which the company does business and languages in which technical support can be conducted.
• Recommended Uses: These are the circumstances under which we recommend the provider. They are not the only circumstances in which it may be a useful provider, but they are the scenarios for which, in Gartner’s opinion, the provider is well-suited.

For a detailed technical description of CIPS offerings, along with a use-case-focused technical evaluation, see “Critical Capabilities for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services, Worldwide.”We also provide a detailed list of evaluation criteria in “Solution Criteria for Cloud Integrated IaaS and PaaS.” A detailed assessment of each provider against these criteria can be found in the Solution Scorecards. The results are also available in Gartner’s Cloud Decisions portal (see “Cloud Decisions’ Cloud Compare: Perform Real-Time IaaS Pricing and Performance Analysis”).

Magic Quadrant

Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services

Vendor Strengths and Cautions

Google

Google is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant.

Locations: Google has multiple regions across Japan and the U.S., as well as a presence in Belgium, Singapore, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, the U.K., India, Australia, Brazil, Canada and, Switzerland, as well as the Hong Kong and Taiwan markets.

Recommended Uses: Google has evolved by enhancing its strengths and attacking its limitations to providing a strong offering in every use case, other than the edge use case. Google has a future focus on building out hybrid capabilities and partnerships with telco providers.

Strengths

• Google’s open-source contributions, such as Kubernetes and TensorFlow, have been market-moving innovations that have changed the course of enterprise IT. Such innovations have served to enable other cloud service providers, but also brought developer “mind share” to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Google’s long-term strategy is to bring additional open-source-focused partners into GCP as managed services.
• During the past year, GCP has experienced a noticeable increase in year-over-year market share in terms of IaaS and dbPaaS, albeit from a lower base, relative to other providers in this Magic Quadrant. Google has also made significant gains by closing a number of critical capability gaps between GCP and Microsoft Azure, its nearest competitor in terms of market share and capabilities.
• Gartner clients continue to associate GCP with its big data and data science capabilities, stemming from the use of services such BigQuery and Dataproc. However, the company is pressing into new territory with Anthos, GCP’s container and Kubernetes-based middleware layer, which is designed to support the development and deployment of cloud applications in a hybrid and multicloud model.

Cautions

• Some of Gartner’s clients remain cautious about Google’s commitment to serving the needs of enterprise clients when put in the context of SAP’s preference for Microsoft Azure, and GCP’s slowness in executing on some highly touted partnerships. GCP lacks enterprise-focused aPaaS capabilities and support for Oracle, and it continues to struggle with having an enterprise mindset in the field.
• From a financial perspective, GCP’s revenue is a small fraction of overall Google revenue and GCP’s criticality to the overall business is not as clear as its competitors. Furthermore, GCP’s success may erode the company’s overall healthy gross margins.
• Google’s much-vaunted network capabilities have been the source of a number of GCP outages during the last year, with devastating impact on customers. One outage was multiregional in scope, affecting GCP customers and Google consumer services, such as G Suite and YouTube. This resulted in complete GCP network unavailability for some customers.

Getting started with your migration

One of the challenges with cloud migration is that you’re solving a puzzle with multiple pieces. In addition to a number of workloads you could migrate, you’re also solving for challenges you’re facing, the use cases driving you to migrate, and the benefits you’re looking to gain. Each organization’s puzzle will likely get solved in their own unique way, but thankfully there is plenty of guidance on how you can migrate common workloads in successful ways. 

In addition to working directly with our Rapid Assessment and Migration Program (RAMP), we also offer a plethora of self-service guides to help you succeed! Some of these guides, which we’ll cover below, are designed to help you identify the best ways to migrate, which include meeting common organizational goals like minimizing time and risk during your migration, identifying the most enterprise-grade infrastructure for your workloads, picking a cloud that aligns with your organization’s sustainability goals, and more: 

• Get started with this cloud migration guide and checklist
• Key considerations for building a migration factory to Google Cloud
• Understanding the cloud migration strategies at your disposal
• Understanding how to migrate key enterprise workloads to Google Cloud

Which workloads are you moving?

In addition to the guides above which help you through your end-to-end migration, it’s also important to understand the specific workloads you’ve got on-premises (or in other clouds). Each workload has their own unique nuances — what works for one might not work perfectly for another. This is where leveraging the expertise of our RAMP team is crucial, and why we have lots of migration guides for specific workloads and end-states. For each workload, we’re highlighting a few guides that we think could be most helpful, but you can also click each topic to learn more or find more guides. 

Microsoft

• Modernization path for .NET applications on Google Cloud
• Managed Service for Microsoft Active Directory is GA
• Migrating Microsoft workloads to Google Cloud yields results

VMware

• Migrate, scale, and innovate at speed
• Boost Retail Intelligence and Agility in the Cloud
• Retire your tech debt: Move vSphere 5.5+ to Google Cloud VMware Engine
• Financial Services Spotlight:  Elevating agility and security in the cloud

Oracle

• Curious about Google Cloud Bare Metal Solution? Start here
• Getting Started with Google Cloud’s Bare Metal Solution
• Guide – Bring new life to your databases with an Oracle migration

SAP

• SAP on Google Cloud: Migration strategies
• Run your SAP workloads on Google Cloud Bare Metal Solution
• eBook – Google Cloud for SAP: The enterprise cloud for business agility, insights, and innovation

Storage

• How to transfer your data to Google Cloud
• An Overview of the Transfer Appliance
• Migration to Google Cloud: Transferring your large datasets
• Transferring data from Amazon S3 to Cloud Storage using VPC Service Controls and Storage Transfer Service

Databases

• Overview of Database Migration Service
• Database migration: Concepts and principles (Part 1)
• Database migration: Concepts and principles (Part 2)
• Database cloud migrations made easy for PostgreSQL, MySQL

Data Warehouses

• Migrating data warehouses to BigQuery: Introduction and overview
• Oracle to BigQuery migration
• Amazon Redshift to BigQuery migration guide
• IBM Netezza to BigQuery migration guide
• Teradata to BigQuery migration guide

Take the next step

When it comes to migration, we’re committed to meet every organization where they are. We fully understand the nuances and challenges of cloud migration, and at Google Cloud we have one singular goal: to help you realize true business value through your cloud migrations. 

Visit our Migration Architecture Center to find even more guides to use during your migration, or if you’re looking to dive a little deeper into planning, sign up for a free discovery and assessment of your existing IT landscape.

Microsoft and Windows on Google Cloud provides a first-class experience for Windows workloads. You can self-manage workloads or leverage managed services and use license-included images or bring your own licenses. Now, easily migrate, optimize, and modernize your Windows workloads for agility and scalability.

Start with migration

Migrate to increase IT agility and reduce on-premises footprint. Tools like Migrate for Compute and Migrate for Anthos can help migrate and upgrade.

Optimize license usage to reduce cost

Optimize VM usage. Managed SQL Server and Active Directory reduce total cost of ownership. Move .NET to .NET core. Move SQL Server to Linux.

Modernize to reduce single-vendor dependency

Create an open path to modernization—containerization of Windows server, cloud-native development, and multi-cloud readiness with Anthos. 

Drive a strategy for migration, optimization, and modernization

Plan for the future while reducing your Microsoft licensing dependency. Get all you need to migrate, optimize, and modernize your legacy platform.

Bring your own licenses

In addition to on-demand licenses, Google Cloud provides you with flexibility for bringing your existing licenses and running them on Compute Engine. Use Sole-Tenant Nodes to run on dedicated hardware with configurable maintenance policies to support your on-premises licenses while maintaining workload uptime and security through host-level live migration.

License-included VM images

You can deploy your Windows applications (including SQL Server) on our fully tested images with bundled licenses on Compute Engine and take advantage of many benefits available to virtual machine instances such as reliable storage options, the speed of the Google network, and autoscaling.

Fully managed SQL Server and Active Directory

Use an easy-to-manage and compatible relational database service in the cloud to reduce operational overhead. Use a highly available, hardened service to manage authentication and authorization for your AD-dependent workloads, automate AD server maintenance and security configuration, and connect your on-premises AD domain to the cloud.

Windows on Kubernetes

Running your Windows Server containers on GKE can save you on licensing costs, as you can pack many Windows Server containers on each Windows node.

Google Cloud is built on world-class technical infrastructure that supports services that are loved and relied on by billions of people across the globe: Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps and more. A core tenet at Google Cloud is to leverage Google’s experience building and operating highly available and highly reliable planetary-scale compute, storage and networking systems and data centers. 

Google takes a workload-optimized approach to building its infrastructure, employing a combination of dedicated hardware and software components to meet its workloads’ ever-growing demands. Underpinning this infrastructure is Titanium, a system of purpose-built, custom silicon and multiple tiers of scale-out offloads that together power improvements in the performance, reliability, and security of our customers’ workloads (for example, 25% faster block storage IOPS/instance compared to the other two leading hyperscalers). Unveiled today at Google Cloud Next, you’ll find Titanium technology in many of Google Cloud’s recent infrastructure offerings.

10x demands of tomorrow 

Meeting the growing performance, reliability, and security demands of both legacy and emerging workloads is a constant challenge for cloud infrastructure providers. And now, these demands are multiplying with the heightened adoption of generative AI across almost every industry. Meanwhile, the benefits of Moore’s law have been declining in recent years. We can’t rely on silicon advances alone to meet tomorrow’s needs.

As just one example, this chart shows the exponential computing demands of large language models.

It was clear to us a long time ago that we needed to rethink our infrastructure designs to meet these demands. This is why, for several years, we’ve adopted workload-optimization and intentional design as central principles for our infrastructure platform. We engineer golden paths from silicon to the customer workload, using a combination of purpose-built infrastructure, prescriptive architectures, and an open ecosystem to deliver workload-optimized infrastructure. 

Offloads play a pivotal role

Central to this strategy are offload technologies. Traditionally, the CPU wears many hats: It runs the hypervisor, the virtualization stack to enable your workloads, and manages storage and networking I/O; it’s responsible for security isolation for virtual interfaces and physical hardware, etc. In this model, customer workloads running on the CPU contend for resources with these platform tasks.

Offloads on dedicated hardware perform behind-the-scenes security, networking, and storage functions that were previously performed by the host CPU, allowing the CPU to focus on maximizing performance for customer workloads.

A recent example of an on-host offload or accelerator is the Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU), a system-on-chip that we co-designed with Intel to enable better security isolation and performance on our 3rd gen compute instances. The IPU enables:

• Predictable and efficient compute
• Programmable packet processing for low latency, 200 Gbps networking with 3x the packets per second compared to our previous-generation compute instances
• In-transit encryption with the PSP protocol

Another important example of Google’s on-host hardware is Titan, a secure, low-power microcontroller that helps ensure that every machine in Google Cloud boots from a trusted state.

But we did not stop there. To meet tomorrow’s demands, we knew we needed to go past the performance that could be achieved using the host’s dedicated offload hardware.

A tiered system of offloads

A key component of Titanium is its modern offload architecture, which combines capabilities whose scale and performance are well-established within Google, as well as new capabilities tailored for cloud use cases. 

Just as modern workloads scale out horizontally in the cloud, with Titanium, we’ve extended the architecture to augment on-host offloads with an additional tier of scale-out offloads that run outside the host. This system of offloads is deployed fleet-wide and dynamically adjusts to changing workload needs to continually deliver the best performance.

Example 1: Block storage
Titanium scale-out offload enables Hyperdisk block storage to deliver stellar I/O performance. Hyperdisk’s Titanium offload on the host IPU works in tandem with the Titanium scale-out offload tier that distributes I/O across Google’s massive cluster-level filesystem, Colossus.

With traditional offload architectures, higher block storage IOPS requires purchasing larger compute instances. For example, you may need to deploy a data-intensive workload on a compute instance with many more vCPUs than the workload needs just to get sufficient storage performance. This tight coupling results in wasted resources and higher costs for customers. Further, even with large instances, storage performance in the cloud may be inadequate relative to what customers are used to with on-prem storage systems.     

With our new block storage, Hyperdisk powered by Titanium, we have decoupled compute-instance size from storage performance. Hyperdisk uses a tier of offloads in our cloud fabric to offload storage I/O from the customer hosts to achieve higher storage performance even with a general-purpose VM.   

In fact, today we are announcing that Titanium-powered C3 VMs with Hyperdisk Extreme now support 500K IOPS per compute instance in preview to meet the needs of the most demanding workloads. This is 25% faster IOPS/instance compared to the other two leading hyperscalers, courtesy of the Titanium system. 

Example 2: Network routing
Virtual network routing is another example of using a second tier of scale-out offloads (“hoverboards”). With Titanium, Google’s Andromeda virtual networking stack on the IPU offload device sends all packets for which it does not have a route to Hoverboard gateways, which have forwarding information for all virtual networks. Hoverboards are standalone software switches that act as default routers for some flows.

Unlike the traditional gateway model, the control plane dynamically detects flows that exceed a specified usage threshold and programs them to be direct host-to-host flows, bypassing the hoverboards allowing hoverboards to focus on the long tail of less frequent flows. Typically, only a small subset of possible VM pairs in a network communicate with one another, so the VMs only have to store and process a small fraction of the usual network configuration on an individual VM host, improving per-server memory utilization and control-plane CPU scalability.

Titanium already powers your workloads

The Titanium journey began years ago with the component technologies described above. Many of our products already benefit from this architecture, and the newest elements of this architecture are now available with our 3rd gen Compute Engine instances such as C3 and the new Hyperdisk block storage. 

Going forward, look for the Titanium architecture to underpin all future generations of our infrastructure offerings, in the process enabling new classes of infrastructure capabilities that move well beyond the confines of a single server.