10 years of AWS: Are there cracks in the armor? Or is the Cloud game entering the second period?

Interesting news for cloud watchers this week. Two of AWS largest customers have either migrated out or signed on with other services: Dropbox and Apple. 

Dropbox decided to build their own data centers, write their own infrastructure software, and design their own optimized storage servers. Over the past two years, they moved something approaching 1 exabyte of data out of AWS, at a rate of as much as 4 petabytes a day.

At one point, Dropbox was the largest AWS S3 (Simple Storage Service) customer. As I wrote in 2011, they were driving nearly 50% of the object growth in S3. Others have indicated that Dropbox alone constituted at least 2% of AWS's overall revenue.

Meanwhile Apple, who has 782 million iCloud users, reportedly signed a $400-600 million contract with Alphabet's Google Cloud Platform. 

Apple has had large data centers for years, but appears to now be upping their game, launching a larger cloud insourcing initiative called, "Project McQueen." Having relied on AWS, Azure, AT&T, and now GCP, it remains to be seen whether Apple can successfully run an infrastructure of this magnitude.

Are these chinks in AWS armor? Not so fast. AWS is still growing at 69% year over year, now at a staggering annual run rate of nearly $10 billion of revenue based on their Q1 2016 reporting. Remember, that's more revenue than VMware. In fact, AWS would rank as the fourth largest software company in the world.

I believe we've reached the second period in the Cloud Game. Players are changing sides, adding new troops like Diane Greene, and ratcheting up the bar. Interesting times getting even more interesting.