Enterprise IT departments are increasing cloud usage at an exponential rate. These tools and technologies enable greater innovation, cost savings, flexibility, productivity and faster-time-to-market, ultimately facilitating business modernization and transformation.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a leader among IaaS vendors, and every year around this time, we look back at the most popular AWS products of the past year, based on the percentage of 2nd Watch clients using them. We also evaluate the fastest-growing AWS products, based on how much spend our clients are putting towards various AWS products compared to the year before.
We’ve categorized the lists into the “100%” and the “Up-and-Comers.” The 100% tools are products that were used by all of our clients in 2020 – those products and services that are nearly universal and necessary in a basic cloud environment. The Up-and-Comers are the five fastest-growing products of the past year.
We also highlight a few products that didn’t make either list but are noteworthy and worth watching.
The “100%” Club
In 2020, there were 12 AWS products that were used by 100% of our client base:
- AWS CloudTrail
- AWS Key Management Service
- AWS Lambda
- AWS Secrets Manager
- Amazon DynamoDB
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
- Amazon Relational Database Service
- Amazon Route 53
- Amazon Simple Notification Service
- Amazon Simple Queue Service
- Amazon Simple Storage Service
- Amazon CloudWatch
Why were these products so popular in 2020? For the most part, products that are universally adopted reflect the infrastructure that is required to run a modern AWS cloud footprint today.
Products in the 100%s club also demonstrate how AWS has made a strong commitment to the integration and extension of the cloud-native management tools stack, so external customers can have access to many of the same features and capabilities used in their own internal services and infrastructure.
The “Up-and-Comers” Club
The following AWS products were the fastest growing in 2020:
- AWS Systems Manager
- Amazon Transcribe
- Amazon Comprehend
- AWS Support BJS (Business)
- AWS Security Hub
The fastest-growing products in 2020 seem to be squarely focused on digital application in some form, whether text/voice translation using machine learning (Comprehend and Transcribe) or protection of those applications and ensuring better security management overall (Security Hub).
This is a bit of a change from 2019, when the fastest-growing products were focused on application orchestration (AWS Step Functions) or infrastructure topics with products like Cost Explorer, Key Management Service or Container Service.
With a huge demand for data analytics and machine learning across enterprise organizations, utilizing services such as Comprehend and Transcribe allows you to gather insights into customer sentiment when examining customer reviews, support tickets, social media, etc.
Businesses can use the services to extract key phrases, places, people, brands, or events, and, with the help of machine learning, gain an understanding of how positive or negative conversations were conducted. This provides a company with a lot of power to modify practices, offerings, and marketing messaging to enhance customer relationships and improve sentiment.
Worth Watching
The following products were new to our Most Popular list in 2020 and therefore are worth watching:
AWS X-Ray allows users to understand how their application and its underlying services are performing to identify and troubleshoot the root cause of performance issues and errors. One factor contributing to its rising popularity is more distributed systems, like microservices, being developed and traceability becoming more important.
Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run. Increased use of Athena indicates more analysis is happening using a greater number of data sources, which signifies companies are becoming more data driven in their decision making.
A surge in the number of companies using EC2 Container Service and EC2 Container Registry demonstrates growing interest in containers and greater cloud maturity across the board. Companies are realizing the benefits of consistent/isolated environments, flexibility, better resource utilization, better automation and DevOps practices, and greater control of deployments and scaling.
Looking Ahead
For 2021, we expect there to be a continued focus on adoption of existing and new products focused on security, data, application modernization and cloud management. In our own client interactions, these are the constant topics of discussion and services engagements we are executing as part of cloud modernization across industries.
About the author: Joey Yore is Manager, Principal Consultants at 2nd Watch.
