Top 30 AWS cloud services

Amazon Web Services consultancy 2^nd Watch this week released the findings of an analysis of 100,000 public cloud instances to determine the 30 most popular services being used. 

It’s not surprising that AWS’s two core products: compute and storage, lead the pack. 100% of the environments 2^nd Watch examined were using Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), the massively scalable object storage service. 99% of customers also were using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), the on-demand virtual machine service. 100% of customers use AWS Data Transfer, because if you have data in the cloud, you need to transfer it in or out at some point.

There are some other surprising results. The fourth most used service among 2^nd Watch customers (a whopping 89%) is Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), a platform for enterprise and mobile messaging. Many 2^nd Watch customers use public cloud best practices by recording their usage of Amazon’s cloud by using AWS Cloud Trail (73% of users), a service that provides detailed logs of activity in an aWS account.

Other products have surprisingly low usage. Less than half of 2^nd Watch customers use Amazon Virtual Private Network (Amazon VPC), which provides logically isolated VMs to customers and are the default EC2 instance type.

2^nd Watch’s study also points to some of the challenges Amazon faces in breaking in new products. Less than one in five 2^nd Watch customers use Amazon’s new in-house applications named Workspaces and Workdocs, which provide virtual desktop and a storage sharing services. Only 11% of customers were using AWS Storage Gateway, a service for bridging on-premises environments to the public cloud. And only 10% were using Amazon Kinesis, the company’s event-processing engine.