State of the Cloud – August 2009
August 1st, 2009 | Published in State of the Cloud | 18 Comments
In this month’s report – EC2 grows by 9%; Rackspace makes an impact
Last month we launched our series of reports on usage of cloud computing infrastructures. Today we’ll follow up to see what has changed in the month that passed. We’re also delighted to expand our coverage into additional providers, providing a wider perspective of the cloud’s adoption.
To see our methodology and data sets, please refer to the first post in the series.
Cloud Providers
Of the 500k sites analyzed, these are the results for the five cloud providers we currently track:
The big surprise here is Rackspace, which seems to be just a step behind Amazon. We should recall that Rackspace’s Cloud Servers (Cloud Sites was not included) is actually Slicehost, an established VPS provider Rackspace acquired in 2008. SliceHost’s transition into a true cloud provider is still in process. For example, we cannot tell how many of the customers we’re seeing are paying per hour as opposed to paying monthly as they could on any other VPS. To highlight this, imagine GoDaddy rebranded their VPS/hosting services as “cloud” – they’d blow the others right out of the water (GoDaddy comprises 6.2% of our sample – almost 20 times the size of Amazon EC2!).
We were curious to see the impact of Google AppEngine, despite the fact that it is a PaaS not IaaS cloud. Despite all the hype, AppEngine has a mere 78 appearances in the top 500k sites.
Amazon EC2′s Monthly Growth
As promised, we’d like to compare Amazon EC2′s standings since last month.
Overall, Amazon EC2 grew by a whopping 9% since last month. This is equivalent to 181% annual growth – truly incredible. Drilling down into the groups, we can see that it’s the first group and the last two groups that are growing fastest. The mid-range seems to be slower at adopting EC2.
Looking deeper into our data, we found 178 sites that migrated into EC2 this month but also 50 that left EC2. Newcomers to EC2 include GossipGirls.com, tech review site WebUpon and Central Connecticut State University. Departees from EC2 include National-Louis University as well as microblogging site Identi.ca (which, we found, switched over to EC2′s competitor Joyent).
August 2nd, 2009 at 12:32 am (#)
[...] This post was Twitted by danorlando1 [...]
August 2nd, 2009 at 5:52 am (#)
[...] InfiBase Blog » Blog Archive » State of the Cloud – August 2009 – Last month we launched our series of reports on usage of cloud computing infrastructures. Today we’ll follow up to see what has changed in the month that passed. We’re also delighted to expand our coverage into additional providers, providing a wider perspective of the cloud’s adoption. [...]
August 2nd, 2009 at 3:45 pm (#)
Don’t get me wrong: I love Slicehost and recommend it. But putting them in the same category as EC2 or AppEngine is really Apples to Oranges. Most of Slicehost sites are plain VPS. Even if you look at the “Rackspace Cloud Servers” it is very far from being a true cloud solution.
Charging for VPS hosting by the hour, which is essentially what they are doing, does not make you a cloud host. It is critically missing the flexible scalability features of EC2 and AppEngine. So maybe your next post should be “Does charging for VPS by the hour make you a cloud host?”…
August 2nd, 2009 at 6:23 pm (#)
Zviki, Thanks for the comment. First I think there is some confusion here. App Engine should be compared to Cloud Sites, and not Cloud Servers. They are in same family of Platform as a Service Cloud (PaaS). Latest analyst reports has Rackspace Cloud Sites as #1, followed by Google Ap Engine in the Paas category.
Second, I have heard the argument you are making before, but honestly I do not find it very valid. Based on this line of thinking, EC2 is also effectively a Xen based VPS offer. In our view, Cloud is a set of “pooled” computing resources, that is delivered over the web, and that is powered by software. Both EC2 and Rackspace Cloud Servers fit that definition.
To clarify, Cloud hosting offers are highly productized and each offer has a unique set of differences. As an example: EC2 has ephemeral storage, while Cloud Servers Storage is persistent. How IPs are handled are also different. Etc. These are product choice decisions. But, to say these differences make one a Cloud or not is not accurate. I can tell you this, there are oodles of people launching servers on demand to scale, doing bursty workloads, paying utility by the hour, and loving it on Cloud Servers. If that is not Cloud, then what is? I look forward to the discussion! I would love to hear more from you: emil.sayegh@rackspace.com. General Manager of the Rackspace Cloud
August 2nd, 2009 at 10:52 pm (#)
Hi Guy,
The statistics you post are definitely interesting. Have you done the attempt of tracking the same data set from QuanCast into the past? It would be really interesting to learn how has the cloud evolved in terms of usage over the past months/years.
I do hope you keep doing this work and keep posting it. I’m already waiting for next month’s report.
August 3rd, 2009 at 7:54 am (#)
@Emil,
AFAIK there is no spec for “Cloud Computing”. IMHO the true “cloud” is in PaaS and your Cloud Sites fall into that category. However, these were not compared here.
Nevertheless, for me, the essence is having a worry free scale-up/down elasticity and flexible pricing. For example, my TypePad blog (clearly SaaS) falls into this category since I never worry about traffic spikes. My Slicehost hosted site does not, since I have to specifically ask it to be relocated on a bigger slice if I anticipate a spike. Event if I switch to you Cloud Servers, I still need to “see it coming” and ask for it to be re-sized.
This seemingly small difference is exactly the point. If your Cloud Servers will have the ability to automatically scale up as traffic starts surging in and shrink back when it stops – it would be a totally different ball game in my book (and please provide an option to migrate my current Slicehost VPS… kthxbye).
It is still limited, because it is still just one machine with a maximum processing power, but it is sufficient for the majority of web sites.
August 3rd, 2009 at 10:22 am (#)
Quite a discussion going on here! The cloud is a vague term with definitions aplenty, but what’s clear is that there is no one cloud. SaaS (e.g., Salesforce) to PaaS (e.g., Google AppEngine or Rackspace Cloud Sites) to IaaS (e.g., Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud Servers) are each a category in their own right.
Comparing IaaS and PaaS is truly apples and oranges – AppEngine and EC2 shouldn’t really have been compared together (we were just curious). Is auto-scaling a requirement of being IaaS? I believe that it’s the *ability* to scale that is essential, not necessarily the automation of that process. Even the category leader Amazon EC2 added auto-scaling just a couple of months ago.
August 4th, 2009 at 11:17 pm (#)
[...] This post was Twitted by addmy2cents [...]
August 5th, 2009 at 10:11 pm (#)
[...] the level of adoption, who is leading, what the market dynamics are, etc. This is something InfiBase recently did an excellent research study [...]
August 8th, 2009 at 1:16 am (#)
[...] week a web research shop called InfiniBase released a study comparing the top 500k domains on the internet and how many of them were hosted on cloud providers. In all [...]
August 8th, 2009 at 1:48 am (#)
[...] week a web research shop called InfiniBase released a study comparing the top 500k domains on the internet and how many of them were hosted on cloud providers. In all [...]
August 12th, 2009 at 4:39 am (#)
[...] [Link] [...]
August 18th, 2009 at 8:56 am (#)
[...] researched top 500,000 websites (based on Quantcast metrics) and their usage of cloud services. While EC2 [...]
August 26th, 2009 at 2:31 pm (#)
[...] link is being shared on Twitter right now. @guyro, an influential author, said State of the Cloud Aug [...]
September 1st, 2009 at 10:11 am (#)
[...] This post was Twitted by guyro [...]
September 1st, 2009 at 3:12 pm (#)
[...] State of the Cloud – August 2009 :: Jack of all Clouds http://www.jackofallclouds.com/2009/08/state-of-the-cloud-august-2009 – view page – cached #Jack of all Clouds RSS Feed Jack of all Clouds » State of the Cloud – August 2009 Comments Feed Jack of all Clouds Top Sites on Amazon EC2 – July 2009 4 Reasons Companies Switch To The Cloud Welcome! 4 Reasons To Subscribe — From the page [...]
September 3rd, 2009 at 8:22 pm (#)
[...] here to see the original: State of the Cloud – August 2009 :: Jack of all Clouds This entry is filed under VPS Providers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the [...]
August 6th, 2010 at 2:57 pm (#)
[...] State of the Cloud August 2009, I noted that Amazon EC2 (which I’d covered in a previous one-off post) had grown 9% in just [...]