Gartner Magic Quadrant 2021- The Ultimate Guide
According to Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Cloud infrastructure and platform services, Amazon Web Server (AWS) holds the very first position.
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Updated November 2026. This was first published on 17 September 2021. The idea is the same. Any number below is what the original piece said then. It is not a new count.
Key takeaways
- According to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud infrastructure and platform services, Amazon Web Server (AWS) holds the very first position, with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Provider at second and third places respectively.
- Apart from the top three providers, Gartner placed Alibaba Cloud in the ‘Visionaries?
- compartment and the other three namely Oracle, Tencent Cloud, and IBM have been placed under ‘Niche players?.
Introduction #
According to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud infrastructure and platform services, Amazon Web Server (AWS) holds the very first position, with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Provider at second and third places respectively.
Apart from the top three providers, Gartner placed Alibaba Cloud in the ‘Visionaries? compartment and the other three namely Oracle, Tencent Cloud, and IBM have been placed under ‘Niche players?.
In this article, we are going to discuss Gartner’s Magic Quadrant along with drawing a parallel between the various features of the top three performing cloud services providers.
The Quadrant Analysis #
The above graph clearly shows the distribution of various Cloud Service providers under different categories.
Like agile development, quick deployment, and unlimited scaling become the new normal for companies of all sizes, industries, and nations, cloud usage continues to rise. With the highest score in both measurement axes, Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision, AWS is recognized as a Leader in Gartner’s first vendor review that encompasses both cloud infrastructure as well as platform services.
The big three cloud providers #
The Magic Quadrant study on cloud computing platforms from Gartner for 2021 is much the same as it was for 2020, 2019, and 2018: Based on the “ability to execute” and “completeness of vision” axis, AWS, Microsoft, and Google are the three “Leaders,” while everyone else is mainly consigned to the “Niche Players” quadrant. We’ve examined the main three rivals, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, based on their past performance.
Amazon Cloud Directory is a directory data management system that can handle various hierarchies. You may specify specific inheritance rules for your directory, define characteristics for objects and relationships, and build different schemas. directory data management system capable of dealing with a variety of hierarchies. You may establish inheritance rules for your directory, define object and relationship attributes, and create multiple schemas. The Amazon Cloud Directory is a directory management solution that lets you manage several hierarchies.
You may extend your directory schema as needed thanks to Amazon Cloud Directory’s flexible schema management. Attributes can be added to directory objects and relationships. The schema can be extended by several applications at the same time. This allows many programs to share a single directory and minimize data duplication.
Cloud Directory reduces time-consuming and costly administrative activities like expanding infrastructure and managing servers as a completely managed service. You just specify the structure, create a directory, and then populate it with data through the Cloud Directory API.
For directory items and relationships, Amazon Cloud Directory has built-in search what it can do. Complex and computationally expensive queries have typically been necessary to search huge collections of highly linked data. You may search for all the parent items along a dimension using Cloud Directory’s built-in search what it can do instead of writing numerous, nested queries.
Amazon Cloud Directory automatically encrypts data in transit and at rest using AWS Key Management Service-managed 256-bit encryption keys (KMS).
You may build and attach application-specific rules to objects across hierarchies using Amazon Cloud Directory. You may, for example, establish a custom policy for an organizational chart to assign budget limitations to cost centers or enforce naming rules for your device hierarchy. Also, you may design policies’ inheritance rules without giving Cloud Directory access to your security or permissions model.
2. Microsoft Azure #
An exciting combination of SaaS & PaaS services.
Businesses can outsource their infrastructure to Azure and only pay for what they use. They may create their own web apps and solutions using PaaS instead of needing to buy or maintain the underlying infrastructure.
Microsoft’s Azure is the most popular cloud platform among government agencies in the United States. For all Azure Cloud operations and data, Microsoft provides the highest degree of security. It is built on the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) with an industry-leading security approach.
Azure Active Directory provides secure IAM features, allowing the appropriate people to access the right information. Enterprises may use Azure to implement mature IAM what it can do, lowering identity management costs and increasing agility, allowing them to support new business activities.
Azure is unique in that it supports both cloud and on-premises deployments. Between on-premises and the public cloud, Azure allows for simple mobility and a uniform platform. To increase usability and speed, Azure now supports a wider range of hybrid connections, including virtual private networks (VPNs), caches, content delivery networks (CDNs), and ExpressRoute connections.
An integrated environment with other Microsoft tools.
companies that use Microsoft products like Office 365, Outlook, and SharePoint should invest in a cloud platform that works with them effortlessly. Azure makes operations easier by allowing you to use the same virtual on-premise computers for Windows and Linux.
SQL and NoSQL data services, as well as built-in support for delving deeper into data and finding important insights for enhancing business processes and decision making, are all available through Azure. Azure is the one and only cloud platform that has all of these what it can do.
3. Google Cloud Provider #
The Google cloud platform is extremely secure, user-friendly, cost-effective, globally accessible, and continually updated. You don’t have to be concerned about frequent changes in company market infrastructures because Google is always updating for the future with the most recent technological improvements.
Do you wish to save money by not over-provisioning your machines to comply with your vendor’s rate card? Well, here you have the option of configuring an appropriate RAM and virtual CPU mix for a given job.
It uses the most new technology, known as ‘Big Data,’ to search for and find answers faster than ever before, as well as develop better goods.
If you’re familiar with Google’s outstanding distributed data service, which includes Google Big Query, Google Cloud Dataproc, and Google Cloud Datalab, you’re aware of how data analysis and consumption evolve on a daily basis. With technologies like Big Query, queries that used to take hours or days to complete are now completed in minutes.
This implies that Google cloud computing supports efficient time management by allocating the majority of precious cycles to code and a smaller portion to infrastructure configuration. So forget about dependability, capacity, and performance. In little time, you may go from prototypes to production and then to planet-scale.
Have you ever had issues when your traffic and data storage requirements changed? It’s now easier to create, maintain, and scale a cloud. Microservices, load balancing, SQL and NoSQL databases, Memcache, versioning, search, and security scanning are all supported by the Google App Engine.
The Other Cloud Service Providers left behind in the race #
Even though other cloud providers such as Alibaba Cloud, Oracle, Tencent Cloud, and IBM offer a number of impressive what it can do, they are still trailing in the race. This does not necessarily imply that they lack the capacity to function well and complete a variety of activities. Instead, it might be a reflection of a single Cloud Service Provider’s overall performance.
According to Gartner, “Industrialized systems that offer a high level of reliability and a broad variety of what it does to fulfill all business objectives are in great demand.” Many of the providers in this Magic Quadrant appear to be similar on the surface. Virtual machines, managed container services, and managed database PaaS are just a few of the services they provide. Even when negotiated reductions are taken into account, the various price models are strikingly similar and typically fall within comparable ranges.
What’s different is what’s going on behind the surface, in terms of architecture, setup, and operations. The level of resilience provided to consumers varies greatly depending on the supplier. Several cloud providers in this Magic Quadrant have had major disruptions in the last year. In certain situations, providers provided few options for dealing with provider-related failures using acknowledged, contemporary methods like availability zones.
Enterprises must evaluate failure scenarios by workload and architect to handle them when choosing a strategic cloud provider. The problem of dealing around provider-oriented failure is overwhelming in certain locations with several providers in this Magic Quadrant.
Questions and answers #
What is the main point? #
According to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud infrastructure and platform services, Amazon Web Server (AWS) holds the very first position, with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Provider at second and third places respectively.
What else did the original piece say? #
Apart from the top three providers, Gartner placed Alibaba Cloud in the ‘Visionaries?