State of the Cloud – November 2009
November 2nd, 2009 | Published in State of the Cloud | 4 Comments
It’s that time of month again, which means a new State of the Cloud post is upon us! For new readers, State of the Cloud is a regular report on the adoption of cloud infrastructures, comparing the share held by each provider. The first post in the series describes methodology, data sets and caveats.
Old or New?
During my recent presentation at the IGT, I was asked whether there is any evidence to back up the belief that newcomers are embracing cloud infrastructure more than established companies. Before our regular monthly numbers, let’s take a shot at that question. The technique we’ll use is simple: take registration dates for domains in the State of the Cloud data set, and compare those of cloud-hosted sites to those of the general population. (The analysis was performed with a random sampling of each group.)
The difference is easily recognizable to the naked eye. While both groups have representation across the board, cloud-hosted sites tend to be much newer. Calculating the median of each group, the overall median year of registration in our data set is 2003, while that for cloud-hosted sites is 2005. These findings won’t come as news to anyone, but it’s great to let the numbers tell the story of the cloud’s early adopters.
And now for our regular programming -
Snapshot for November 2009
Amazon leaps ahead, this month attaining a 35% lead on runner up Rackspace Cloud Servers. I’d like to note that due to an update of Quantcast’s top million sites (the input data set), this month’s results may be “bumpier” than usual. In the grand scheme of things, these regular updates will contribute to greater accuracy.
Monthly Growth
GoGrid got the biggest boost this month, even though in absolute numbers there is a lot of ground to be covered. In the race for pole position, Amazon greatly outpaced Rackspace. We might infer that that the updated data set’s positive effect on GoGrid and Amazon EC2 reflects well on them: it is an indication of their true strength amongst the top of the crop of Internet sites, as compared to the other providers.
Trends
Regardless of the individual providers’ standings, the overall growth of the cloud providers surveyed over the past 3 months (as indicated by the black line) is an incredible 33% – from 3170 hits in our data set 3 months ago to 4217 this month.
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:09 pm (#)
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Guy Rosen, Shlomo Swidler. Shlomo Swidler said: RT @guyro: State of the Cloud Nov 09: comparing EC2 @rackcloud @joyent @gogrid @opsource + stats on cloud users: http://bit.ly/3lzpxf [...]
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:25 pm (#)
Would be great if you could provide an embeddable link (iFrame) to your latest updated chart similar to what Compete.com offers if one compares several sites.
Also, is there any way to produce a similar chart for the upper-right companies in Gartner’s cloud computing provider magic quadrant? A link to the Gartner report and Cloud Technology Partner’s reviews and analysis of those firms is at: http://cloudtp.com/cloud-computing-companies/cloud-computing-leaders
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:35 pm (#)
@Erik -
On the IFrame: good idea, I might do that. Which of the charts do you prefer?
On the magic quadrant: despite what it’s “supposed” to mean, I find that the companies in the upper-right corner are still not quite there, at least in terms of cloud as this report sees it. Savvis, AT&T and Terremark have been leading the traditional colocation market for years (hence they are there) but in terms of the newer “cloudy” paradigms they’re only just getting started. Additionally, since these providers are targeting the enterprise market they won’t really show up in this website-oriented research. (Not saying enterprise isn’t interesting: on the contrary. If only we could measure those too!)
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:58 pm (#)
If possible, all three dynamic monthly charts would be great. If you set up one, hopefully it isn’t difficult to set up a couple more. We will embed them in our reviews with credit to your site.
Agreed on the traditional managed hosting and colocation companies just getting started. See our reviews of each at: http://cloudtp.com/cloud-computing-companies/cloud-computing-leaders
Will be interesting to see how much traction Savvis, Terremark, AT&T, and Verizon get as their offerings emerge and mature.