How do you compare big cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure?

During his Container World talk last week, Docker Chief Developer Advocate Patrick Chanezon gave his opinion by picking movies to represent each cloud provider. It was perceptive stuff, but more importantly, it was goofy fun — which is why we're summarizing his points here.

Amazon Web Services = Pacific Rim

This one's pretty simple. Pacific Rim is about enormous monsters that emerge from the sea and are really hard to beat back. I don't know if the monsters add features and get yelled at by Oracle, but if they do, it's a perfect analogy.

Microsoft Azure = Field of Dreams

Chanezon did not mean Microsoft is going to play in one game and never reappear. It's more that Microsoft has a "build it and they will come" strategy. It's got a public cloud in Azure, and it's now got a hand in private clouds with Azure Stack, which extends Azure's technology into an enterprise's own data center. Microsoft is planting Azure seeds everywhere and doesn't much care which permutation of cloud wins.

VMware = 300

300 is about a small but ferocious band of Spartans. They're very loud. But in the end, well...

VMware's vCloud Air strategy has shifted to the hybrid cloud and away from private clouds, but my impression is that VMware won't end up emphasizing its own cloud service at all. Rather, vCloud Air is becoming more about offering technology to other cloud providers.

Google = Back to the Future

This one's my favorite. It's not about being retro. Chanezon is talking about only one scene in Back to the Future, the one where Marty McFly, having just "invented" rock 'n' roll, goes into a guitar freak-out complete with feedback and a kicked-over amp. The 1955 crowd stares in horror. "Your kids are gonna love it," he assures them.

"That's exactly the feeling I had when I was talking to enterprise customers about PaaS [platform-as-a-service] and only-public cloud and stuff like that," said Chanezon, who was Google's cloud platform advocacy team manager from 2009 to 2011. "They don't have a path from where enterprises are today, which is inside the firewall, to the public cloud."