News

Firm Tracks Top AWS Products

• By David Ramel
• 05/31/2016

Cloud computing specialist 2nd Watch has issued new research identifying the top Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) products used by its customers during the first quarter of the year.

The Seattle company, an AWS Premier Partner, tracked the top 30 most popular AWS products, adding on to research published a year ago that revealed security tools were the most purchased third-party products for AWS deployments.

In its new research, 2nd Watch ranked the top AWS products according to the percentage of its customers who deployed them in the first quarter.

It found, unsurprisingly, that core products such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) -- for data storage and data transfer -- and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) -- a Web service providing resizable compute capacity -- were the top picks, used by 99 to 100 percent of its polled customers.

Other standard AWS services used by a large majority of its customers included Simple Notification Service (SNS) (89 percent), and Key Management Service for encryption (87 percent). The company noted these services are common in most AWS deployments and have consistently ranked high in customers usage, yielding unsurprising results yet again. That doesn't necessarily hold true for newer products.

"Perhaps less predictable was the use of other AWS products, such as Redshift, the data warehouse service introduced in 2012 as a low-cost alternative to systems from HP, Oracle and IBM," 2nd Watch said. "The fact that 17 percent of our customers are using Redshift demonstrates how quickly innovative cloud technology can carve a strong position in a legacy software market. Enterprises are starting to move away from legacy systems to Redshift because it can handle massive quantities of data with exceptional response times.

"Other relatively new AWS products making rapid progress with AWS users include the high-performing NoSQL database service Dynamo DB (27 percent), Lambda, an automated compute management platform (21 percent) and Workspaces, a secure virtual desktop service (19 percent)."

The company said it expects to see future growth in database, desktop and management tools. An infographic detailing the top 30 most popular products is available here.