Microsoft's cloud grew 73% last year. Leaders and employees from 10 tech companies weigh in on whether it can topple Amazon's cloud reign. (MSFT, AMZN)

satya nadella

Right now, Amazon Web Services has the biggest share in the cloud market, but Microsoft's cloud is catching up as well.
Microsoft has been promoting its hybrid cloud strategy, artificial intelligence abilities, and relationships with enterprise customers.
Business Insider spoke with leaders and developers at 10 tech companies on the state of the cloud wars and whether Microsoft can beat AWS.
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When Microsoft reported its earnings last quarter, it said its cloud business grew 73%.

Microsoft is locked in competition with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud for a larger slice of the cloud market. While AWS has the bulk of the market share, Microsoft's Azure cloud has seen major growth in recent years as well, taking advantage of its longstanding history with enterprise customers.

Microsoft has ramped up its artificial intelligence abilities. And it's been a longtime supporter of hybrid cloud technology, which allows customers to run their workloads on both remote cloud servers and in their own data centers — Google and AWS are just starting to introduce similar products.

Microsoft also has an advantage in winning over retail customers, who may see Amazon as a looming competitor. And lately, Microsoft has been wrestling with AWS over a $10 billion cloud contract with the Pentagon that could change the balance of power in the cloud business.

Business Insider spoke with numerous Microsoft customers at its annual Microsoft Build developer conference in Seattle last week. These developers and executives have used tools from Microsoft's cloud, and in many cases, from Amazon's AWS as well.

If you're trying to get an on-the-ground snapshot of the current state of affairs in the cloud wars, these are the people you want to talk to.

Here's what they have to say about the differences between the two cloud rivals, and about how Microsoft's effort to vanquish Amazon in this massive market is coming along:

Jesse Rothstein, CTO and co-founder of ExtraHop

Microsoft Azure is much smaller than AWS today but they're demonstrating higher growth rates at a smaller scale.

Azure is doing a good job focusing on a particular customer segment that historically AWS has not focused on. Now, AWS is shifting to be more enterprise friendly. There are a lot of verticals that refuse to use AWS because they would be funding a competitor. There's room for two or three cloud providers.

Arthur Steinert, vice president of business development and channel sales at Logz.io

They represent different approaches to the market. They have plenty of strength, and there's plenty of room for both [Microsoft and Amazon].

I think there are other players that need to be watched, like Google and Alibaba. There's plenty of room for more emergents.

Amazon has a good history and story in serving the web startups, and it moved quickly to commercial customers. Microsoft has a mature and evolved partner model. Microsoft does a good job in enabling partner growth.

Veronika Kolesnikova, web developer at Rightpoint

I'm a little biased because I work with [Microsoft] Azure much more and mostly work with Microsoft technologies. They have lots of really awesome tools. I work with speech services, and there are more options on Azure.

People used to think about Microsoft in a certain way, so that reputation is still there. That's why younger developers still don't know about the new Microsoft ... They didn't see Microsoft as a technology partner [for open source]. It will take some time to change people's mindsets.

Corey Scobie, senior vice president of product and engineering and Chef

[Microsoft] embraced the fact that most customers will have their foot in more than one cloud. I don't know if there's a winner or loser, but there's enough market share to go around. We're fundamentally looking to a world where customers use multiple cloud vendors.

Neil Manvar, solutions engineering manager at Sentry

These cloud wars are crazy. I think it's great that Azure has the approach of bringing the best of breed into the pipeline. I'm curious on what they [Microsoft] will do with GitHub. It definitely provides an edge.

Bill Richter, CEO of Qumulo

Microsoft Azure took products people already use and cloudified them. [Amazon] AWS gave people the Legos, the building blocks, they need. AWS went from building blocks up the stack, while Microsoft went from the top down.

A winner-takes-all world in a public cloud world would be a massive failure for society. That's why going multi-cloud is so important. Otherwise the public clouds become the IBM mainframes of 1985, and we know how that story ended.

Denis Cabrol, executive director and general manager of IoT and Security Solutions at NXP

It's completely different markets and customers. [Amazon] AWS is an easy way for customers to get started on cloud. If you're an industrial company and have proprietary secrets, the first thing is to make your data secure. This is where Microsoft will be the right partner.

Joe Duffy, founder and CEO of Pulumi

Microsoft is a familiar choice. Microsoft already has sales relationships going back decades.

It's funny because we go to different conferences, and we work with customers across different clouds. [Amazon] AWS is very consistent. The story is continuity. I don't see that changing.

Microsoft will continue to excel in enterprise. I would guess the growth rate is much faster in terms of percentage growth.

Overall, AWS usage is huge, and I don't see that changing.

Ed Charbeneau, senior developer advocate at Progress

They both have different approaches to onboarding developers to the ecosystem. Microsoft has enterprise ties. That's been their strong suit from its inception.

You'll probably see pendulum swinging type of behavior. Some people might use AWS, and then find something they don't like and move to Azure, and then they'll find out the grass is greener and move back, or vice versa.

Amit Bahree, CTO for AI at Avanade

Competition is good. It's technically not a duopoly now. The mindshare is still with [Amazon] AWS. It's Microsoft's job to win more of the work.

One thing which is great for Microsoft is that their hybrid story is so much stronger, which is not the case with AWS. Will they beat AWS? No. Will they close the gap? I'm confident.

Vikram Ghosh, vice president of business development at Chef

If I just look at the growth rates, they're [Microsoft] on the path to catch up. I don't know about beat but they're closing the gap.

It's never going to be a winner-take-all because people choose multi-cloud strategy for a reason — they don't want vendor lock-in. Also, the market is bound for more growth. I don't see that coming down anytime in the future.

Sara Faatz, senior manager of developer relations at Progress

I think if more organizations adopt a multi-cloud strategy, [Microsoft] Azure stands to capture some of the market share. Where there's more significant room to grow is through innovations like the Microsoft Machine Learning and AI announcements we heard at Build.

At the end of the day, the winner is the developer, as strong competition is one of the drivers for the advancements in cloud computing.