[echelon]

> barriers to entry drop

Are more providers entering into the cloud space? I thought AWS and Azure had this on lock down, with Google a third fiddle.

Are new companies able to enter this space now? I assume the capital investment required for allocating and maintaining tons of data centers at edge nodes that are globally distributed would be too steep.

[discodave]

Arguably the CDNs (Akamai, CloudFlare and friends) have made the capital investment, and are now in the cloud business.

But I don't see anybody competing with AWS/Azure/GCP anytime soon.

[donavanm]

Maaaaaybe. I see the CDNs bringing on compute & durablish storage at the edge. And id buy the argument theyre positioning themselves for the next round of “cloud” ala Lambda + DynamoDB.

But I strongly object to the capital characterization. Akamai, the gorilla in the CDN room, to looks to have capital expenditures of $200M or so for hardware/colo/etc. Cloudflare was spending $20-30M IIRC. Conversely Amazon “Cash capital expenditures were $6.7 billion, $10.1 billion, and $11.3 billion in 2016, 2017, and 2018, which primarily reflect additional capacity to support our fulfillment operations and additional investments in support of continued business growth in technology infrastructure (the majority of which is to support AWS).”

Money alone doesnt buy success but the CDN guys dont seem to showing up to the game yet. As youve noted I dont really see anyone else on the trajectory to general competition with the big three.

Disclaimer: Im a principal at AWS and have worked on CloudFront. All my comments are based on my personal reading of publicly available data like 10K & S1 filings.