Jack of All Clouds by Guy Rosen

Welcome to the one-year anniversary of State of the Cloud! It’s been an exciting year for the cloud computing industry, which is maturing from a fledgling phenomenon into a massive shakeup of IT. While we haven’t quite crossed the chasm, we’re definitely looking across it and preparing for the leap into the mainstream.

In 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 a month, hinting at 181% CAGR. One year later, let’s see if EC2 lives up to these expectations.

While EC2’s overall growth in our survey hasn’t lived up to 181%, there is hardly any reason for disappointment. With the exception of Joyent, the evidence shows that all of the providers tracked have seen incredible growth over the past year. The two leaders have doubled their share and continue their neck-to-neck race (more on that below). The smaller GoGrid and Linode have more than doubled in size, however their is still a large gap between them and the major league duo.

If we tally up all the numbers, we find that overall the cloud has doubled in size over the past year: back in August 2009, State of the Cloud found 3,635 websites on cloud providers. This month that number is 7,278. That’s 100.2% growth.

Snapshot for August 2010

Let’s turn back to this month. The race continues, but takes a surprising twist:

For the first time since this survey began, Amazon EC2 has dropped. Last month we counted 3,043 sites on EC2. This month, that figure is 3,011 – negative growth of 1.2%. Granted, that’s a pretty small figure and could well be a statistical anomaly; nonetheless it will no doubt be a concern to Amazon, what with Rackspace breathing down its neck.

A Word of Appreciation

It’s been a fantastic year. I’d like to take this opportunity to extend my thanks to all of you out there in the cloud industry who have pitched in, to the providers who readily cooperate (and to those who don’t…) – and above all to you, my loyal readers, whose feedback and encouragement are a real driving force. Where will we be in August 2011? Let’s wait and find out.

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.

We interrupt our regular programming for the following update.

Unfortunately, this month we have no regular post in the State of the Cloud series. Quantcast’s Top 1M Site list, which is the input data set used by the research, is broken. Instead of 1 million sites, the list contains only 78,000. Clearly, this makes it difficult to continue tracking using the same, consistent methodology we’ve had in place for almost a year.

Quantcast are aware of the problem, but “do not have an ETA on the fix”.

What you can do

Help us prioritize Quantcast’s investigation of this issue: go to http://www.quantcast.com/contact and tell Quantcast what you think. Here’s an example of what you could write:

Subject: Broken top 1M list
Message:
Dear Quantcast team,
As a regular reader of the popular JackOfAllClouds.com blog, I was dismayed to hear that due to a malfunction in Quantcast’s Top 1M Site List, the blog is unable to publish its monthly analysis of the cloud computing industry. As this research is an essential source of data on the entire cloud industry, I kindly ask you to urgently look into this issue.