State of the Cloud – July 2010
July 1st, 2010 | Published in State of the Cloud | 15 Comments
After a brief intermission, we’re back this month with an action-packed State of the Cloud report. In this month’s analysis of the top cloud providers we’ll be debuting a newcomer into the charts which makes quite an entrance. We’ll also run the analysis with an alternative data set and see if it confirms or refutes our findings.
Snapshot for July 2010
Here are the results for this month. Welcome Linode.
The top pair continue their steady march forward with 13% and 19% growth for Amazon EC2 and Rackspace Cloud Servers respectively, as compared to the last report two months ago. Amazon EC2 is the first of our contenders to smash the 3000-site barrier.
Linode is this month’s surprise, jumping straight into third place. I was deliberating whether Linode should be included in the report. Following some lively discussions on Twitter, the consensus was that Linode looks like a duck and walks like a duck, even if it doesn’t bother quacking. (This, as opposed to some providers that work hard to market themselves cloud while they don’t really seem to be.)
Linode offer a rich feature set and have an outstanding reputation among their customer community. The last time I saw this picture it was Slicehost, who ended up being acquired by Rackspace to jumpstart their Cloud Servers offering. What does the future hold for Linode?
Trends
Uncovering Linode’s footprint in the historical data collected, we witness remarkable growth. Linode has grown by 270% over the past 11 months, more than any other of the providers tracked.
Alternative Data Sets
Last month we skipped a report due to a bug in the top site list published by Quantcast, which serves as the input for this research. This prompted me to consider other data sets that could also be used. So what would our results be like if we used another well-known source of top site rankings? I chose to take Alexa, a well-known source, for a spin and see what happens. Here’s what I found -
I was pleased to find the results do not differ greatly between the different sets. The overall rankings are preserved although some providers do exhibit some variation (particularly Rackspace, which loses over 20% when we use Alexa). Even if it is tempting to switch data sets, continuity is of grave importance for research like this one. The findings above do confirm that the standings are in the same ballpark even when viewed through a different lense. Hence I am happy to continue using Quantcast (well, unless last month’s issues pop up again!).
Next month marks a year since the first State of the Cloud. This milestone will serve as an opportunity to look back and see what progress and changes we’ve seen over the past year – as well as to take a guess at what the future may hold for this industry.
July 1st, 2010 at 5:27 pm (#)
Forgot to mention in the post – in case you are wondering where FlexiScale went, their numbers dropped enough for me to decide they are either too small or that the data I use to measure them is not as accurate as I’d hoped. For the time being, they will be omitted from the report.
July 1st, 2010 at 5:40 pm (#)
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by datacenter. datacenter said: RT @guyro: State of the Cloud Jul '10. Comparing EC2 @rackcloud @joyent @gogrid @opsource and welcoming @linode! http://bit.ly/d8DT7G [...]
July 1st, 2010 at 6:16 pm (#)
IMHO, Linode is not a Cloud Provider but a plain VPS Provider. There is no API to interface with its infrastructure, no real Pay-as-you-grow model. Its backup service is not a cloud storage at all and mount block device. If VPS is cloud, when I was doing Cloud Computing back in early 2003…
July 1st, 2010 at 6:47 pm (#)
@Laurent – You can find information on the Linode API here: http://www.linode.com/api/ :)
July 1st, 2010 at 8:07 pm (#)
The line between VPS and cloud is indeed not an easy one to draw. Just to highlight – Joyent don’t have an API and their plans are typically paid per month. Many of Rackspace Cloud’s users (as counted here) are in fact Slicehost users using pay-per-month packages.
July 1st, 2010 at 10:24 pm (#)
Good job. Adding another data set is excellent – adds serious credibility to the numbers.
July 4th, 2010 at 5:10 am (#)
[...] was just reading State of the Cloud over at Jack of all Clouds. They monitor the various players in the cloud game and who the movers [...]
July 4th, 2010 at 9:41 pm (#)
[...] cloud service provider offering computing and storage services. In the Jack of all Clouds, State of the Cloud report they show them as being one of the fastest growing cloud service [...]
July 4th, 2010 at 9:46 pm (#)
[...] cloud service provider offering computing and storage services. In the Jack of all Clouds, State of the Cloud report they show them as being one of the fastest growing cloud service [...]
July 10th, 2010 at 6:39 am (#)
Thanks for continuing with your research Guy, this is great stuff!
July 24th, 2010 at 5:16 pm (#)
Hi Guy,
+1 for not including Linode.
To be honest, my requirement for a cloud providr would be:
1. Per usage payment (Monthly and even daily slices are too low resolutions)
2. Open APIs
3. Instant provisioning of resources
Cloud Computing is yet just the next stage of hosting, but if we include VPS, why not including all other hosting providers?
Keep Performing,
Moshe Kaplan
http://top-performance.blogspot.com
P.S what about the PaaS platforms? Google App Engine? MS Azure? Salesforce.com Force.com?
July 24th, 2010 at 8:52 pm (#)
@Moshe, I roughly agree with your criteria. You’ll find however that Linode match more of these criteria than, say, Joyent, which is commonly accepted as a cloud provider. I’ve had a lot of discussions with the cloud community over which of these is a “must have” and found no unanimous support for any of the three, individually.
I’ve made a conscious decision to focus on IaaS and not measure PaaS. I took a stab at it in the past but for technical reasons it’s more complex to measure.
July 30th, 2010 at 1:01 am (#)
@Moshe I definitely agree with adding PaaS platforms, but don’t forget about Rackspace Cloud Sites which is the largest Cloud hosting platform.
August 2nd, 2010 at 3:38 pm (#)
Hi Jay,
Great work as always.
Something to keep in mind regarding the difference between the “top 1 million” lists from Quantcast and Alexa:
Quantcast’s is based on US traffic only. Alexa’s is global.
You’re probably aware of that, but I thought I’d point it out just in case.
August 2nd, 2010 at 3:39 pm (#)
Sigh… of course I meant “Guy”… not “Jay”… :)