Cloud Machine Learning Wars: Amazon vs IBM Watson vs Microsoft Azure

Amazon recently announced Amazon Machine Learning, a cloud machine learning solution for Amazon Web Services. Able to pull data effortlessly from RDS, S3 and Redshift, the product could pose a significant threat to Microsoft Azure ML and IBM Watson Analytics. Upon selecting a model, the service asks whether the user would like to holdout data for validation from the training set or to provide holdout data from a different source. Once these selections are made, Amazon ML trains the model on the given dataset. Using the sample dataset of dummy bank customers (5MB in size), training takes roughly 10 minutes.