Installed Technologies: State of IT Infrastructure
Sometimes the low-hanging fruit that is the earliest use case for a technology is also the best use case.
Two decades ago when Amazon made a market for public cloud with the release of Amazon Web Services (AWS), file storage in the cloud was one of the easiest values to envision. Services in the cloud had all kinds of potential to change the way computing was done, how applications could scale, how infrastructure was paid for, how new applications would be piloted, and much, much more.
Yet if you talked to almost any IT manager about this new technology at the time, they could all easily see the value proposition in cloud storage. For many organizations, storage was the first thing in AWS that they keyed in their corporate credit card number to test.
Cloud Storage is Still King
Fast-forward to today. The cloud computing services from AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud have matured and proliferated, with each offering dozens upon dozens of different services; but cloud storage still remains the most popular.
In a recent survey conducted by ActualTech Media, cloud storage ranked first among all available cloud services for each of the major providers.
- For AWS, 66 percent of users were using S3, with only one other service topping 50 percent usage.
- For Google Cloud, storage was even further off the usage charts. While 66 percent of users had Google Storage, the next closest service was 44 percentage points behind.
- For Microsoft Azure, storage was the leader, but by a much narrower margin. Azure storage barely edged out Microsoft’s databases service offerings, 46 percent to 44 percent.
The data came from an ATM survey of 1,380 U.S. respondents covering the technologies that they had installed. Respondents answered questions about their cloud services usage, their virtualization implementations, and their business applications.
Let’s Hear it for Compute
Fittingly, the other baseline cloud computing service – compute – also scored very highly in the survey. Amazon’s next major service release back in 2006 after the S3 cloud storage was Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2. It essentially consisted of a rentable virtualized computer instance in the cloud running Windows Server; one of the first enterprise customers for the service was Microsoft itself.
Nearly 20 years later, EC2 remains AWS’ second most popular service, after S3. Of the ATM survey respondents, 51 percent of AWS customers reported using EC2. For Google customers, the similar Compute Engine service was also the second most popular on that platform, at 22 percent. Among Microsoft customers, the Compute service was also quite popular, although it came in fifth among Azure services, being used by about 32 percent of respondents.
Other Popular Services
Aside from storage and compute, all three of the big cloud platforms have spun out dozens of other services. Comparisons aren’t generally apples to apples, but estimates put Azure at around 600 discrete services, AWS at over 200, and Google Cloud near 100.
ATM’s survey found organizations putting various popular services to good use, although not to nearly the extent that users are deploying storage and compute services.
As mentioned earlier, database services were nearly as popular on Azure as storage services. Databases are also attractive services on AWS, with 34 percent of AWS customers in the survey reporting use of Amazon RDS, for example. Results among Google Cloud users weren’t as clear, although the platform’s BigQuery service counted customers among 13 percent of the survey respondents using Google.
One area where more usage might have been expected, given current hype levels in the industry, was artificial intelligence. AI popped up among Azure users, of whom 17 percent reported using the AI + Machine Learning service. The timing of the survey was slightly ahead of the huge boom in interest in integrating generative AI into every element of the IT stack. This will be an area to keep an eye on for future iterations of this survey.
Overall, it’s a Cloudy World
Not all of the questions focused on cloud technologies. We also asked about usage of virtualization technology from VMware. That usage remains heavy, even with the Broadcom acquisition, with 52 percent of respondents reporting a VMware presence in their environments. Of those, some 79 percent are using vSphere in some capacity, making it by far the most popular VMware technology among survey respondents. Horizon was the second most used VMware technology, at 25 percent.
Speaking of broad usage, Microsoft was the leader, with 64 percent of organizations using Azure in some capacity. For comparison, AWS came in at 49 percent usage in the survey. On the one hand, that’s a surprising number, given that most industry market share surveys place AWS well ahead of Azure when it comes to revenues for cloud computing services in the platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) categories.
On the other hand, it makes sense for Microsoft to come out in the lead in raw number of users, given how integrated Azure services are into Microsoft’s other product categories with massive installed bases, such as Windows PCs, Windows Servers, Microsoft 365, and directory services. In other words, Microsoft’s Azure services touch more users and organizations than Amazon’s, while AWS enjoys deeper usage across the industry.
Meanwhile, Google Cloud came in third among the major cloud providers, with 36 percent usage in the ATM survey. Among other notable vendors, usage of Oracle technologies were reported by a quarter of respondents, with SAP clocking in at about half that share (13 percent).
Overall, while we found a lot of traditional technology in use, cloud platforms account for a substantial portion of organizational infrastructure these days.
