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How Are Organizations Using Amazon's Cloud? Some Interesting Statistics

This article is more than 8 years old.

With Amazon finally lifting the kimono and admitting to the world that its Amazon Web Services (AWS) division is a massive (and fast growing) part of the business, it is interesting to look into what all of that $6 billion worth of revenue is being spent on.

This is all the more interesting given geographical differences - at an AWS event in Sydney a few years ago, I was interested to note that the vast majority of AWS customers were using the basic products - storage and compute, and there wasn't a lot of uptake for the higher value services. This is in contrast with the US where there is usage across the entire AWS product portfolio.

One thing is for sure, and that is, regardless of posturing by other vendors, AWS is the largest pure-cloud vendor. That is; AWS sells more infrastructure as a service (IaaS) products than its competitors Microsoft, Google , IBM, and Rackspace. According to a recent report from Synergy Research Group, AWS currently owns about 29 percent of the market. While the pack is making progress at catching up, and the pie is increasing, AWS's lead is hard for any individual company to overcome, even for companies with the resources of its deep-pocketed competitors.

Interestingly, as more geographic areas open up in terms of their adoption of cloud (SRG used Europe and India as examples), regional nuances create different growth impacts for the different vendors. According to the report, Microsoft grew at a phenomenal 96 percent rate last quarter—almost double the growth enjoyed by AWS. I'm a bit dubious about SRG's inclusion of Salesforce.com in this study - Salesforce is a great software vendor, and certainly sells platform-level product, but isn't really in the infrastructure space.

Another piece of research for those who are interested in cloud usage is a quarterly report put out by AWS partner 2nd Watch.

2nd Watch is a massive reseller and implementer of AWS product and hence has good visibility into what customers are actually doing with the platform. Taking all the different customers it has, 2nd Watch compiled some interesting statistics. Q1 results of note:

  • Companies are moving more big data and analytics applications to AWS. This is based on an almost 50% increase in the number of medium EC2 instances used in Q1, which increased to 29% from 19% in Q4.
  • Windows-based instances in the cloud are also growing. Organizations are moving production apps onto AWS. Windows-based instances grew sharply in Q1, from 34% in Q4 to 76%, while Linux instances declined from 66% to 24%.
  • Cloud-based security products topped the list of most purchased third-party products for AWS deployments. This trend makes sense given that more companies in highly regulated industries are moving data and applications to AWS.
  • An overwhelming majority of companies are using S3 Storage (97%), EC2 (82%) and SNS messaging (70%). Close behind was SQS message queuing service (61.4%, up from 46% in Q4, ‘14) and RDS relational database (46.9%). As for databases, the second most used database service was the EC2 SQL Server standard (16%).

Interesting data points - and it will be fascinating to see the changes in AWS usage as it grows. Amazon is no doubt banking on its higher value services to differentiate it from its competitors. We'll watch and see if uptake of those services points to that being the case.

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