The survey results from RightScale State of the Cloud Report 2016 shows that as expected, AWS1 continues to lead in the adoption of public cloud with a high 57% of respondents currently running apps in the AWS cloud. Compare to 2015, there was no market growth for AWS cloud though.

For Azure (IaaS+PaaS), there is a significant 42.9% growth comparing to the year 2015, on the way to narrow the gap with AWS. Also 45% of the respondents are experimenting either Azure IaaS or PaaS. We are expecting some percentage of those experimenting respondents will transfer into solid user of Azure.

While AWS is comfortably sitting in the leading seat, Azure is adding more features into its cloud service platform.

Does Azure has the potential to take over AWS and become the next Cloud Giant?

When comparing AWS vs. Azure, remember that the two vendors approach the cloud market from different vantage points. In general, AWS focuses on delivering commodity services to small- and medium-sized companies, but recently ramped up its high-end services. Building off of a virtualized cloud platform, AWS services also feature a high degree of automation and scalability.

Microsoft Azure takes a different approach to cloud, emphasizing the integration between its large base of on-premises technologies and its public cloud services. Microsoft provides management tools and a consistent user interface, which appeals to enterprises that want to minimize the number of vendors and systems they use. Enterprises and partners have invested a great deal of money, time and effort into Microsoft's products, which has created a loyal customer base -- and could eventually tip the AWS vs. Azure scale.