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 â 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: