Popular AWS Services: An analysis
AWS began offering its first service in 2004, and since then has since come a long way with more than 70 services today. The company is intensely customer focussed and is constantly innovating to help customers achieve business objectives, releasing new features and updates every week. There is huge momentum in adoption of AWS services across verticals—amongst large, small and medium enterprises, and start-ups.
In the initial years customers were largely using compute and storage services. But now customers are using a large number of services, as they are moving business-critical workloads which require more services and more automation. This is because having experienced the benefits of AWS Cloud—reliability, scalability, secure, cost-effective—customers have started becoming comfortable and confident about deploying on AWS.
We thought it would be an interesting exercise to take stock of popular AWS services and relate it to market trends and business requirements. Based on our analysis of our customer base, and our experience and perspective gained from market interactions, below we provide insights into the most popular AWS Services.
More than 90 percent of customers use AWS foundational services which are required to build and host robust, scalable Web and mobile applications and to enable its quick, efficient delivery. This includes the following services: AWS EC2; AWS IAM; Auto Scaling; AWS Elastic Load Balancing; AWS CloudFront; AWS S3; Route 53; and AWS CloudWatch.
Services like Auto Scaling builds inherent robustness into the architecture to handle unpredictable workloads and achieve cost-effectiveness. AWS S3 and CloudFront are widely used to build high performing websites and distribute content securely and efficiently with minimum latency, in a cost-effective manner.
We have observed increasing popularity of AWS managed services such as AWS RDS which is managed database service; AWS SES and SNS which are managed email and notification services; and Elastic Cache. This demonstrates the comfort level of customers with AWS infrastructure and the gradual transition into the next level of usage by building more automation into AWS deployment.
A more interesting trend is the gradual uptake of services such as AWS RedShift, AWS Elastic Search and AWS DynamoDB. This reflects AWS as the preferred choice among customers for their strategic initiatives around Business Intelligence/ Analytics/ big data. As customers have started storing a lot of data in the AWS Cloud and as a logical progression of adoption, there is an increasing demand for security services such as Web Application Firewall; AWS Cloud Trail and AWS Cloud Configuration.
AWS Marketplace is becoming increasingly popular destination as customers seek higher levels of security, back up and monitoring from third-party solution providers.
Our expectation is that there is going to be substantial change in top services in the next few years, as customer are getting more comfortable in using AWS cloud services and deployments will become more sophisticated.
