Data Shows That Amazon Remains the 800-Pound Gorilla in the Cloud

by Sam Dean - Feb. 16, 2012Comments (1)

With the announcement of its CloudStack 3 platform this week, Citrix Systems took a bold step forward in competing with Amazon in the cloud computing space, and open source cloud computing platforms are proliferating more rapidly than ever. However, there is no question that Amazon Web Services (AWS) remains a dominant force in the cloud space, and newly released data only corroborates that fact. In fact, Amazon's dominance is making it tough for open source-focused cloud players to compete. Here are the details.

According to the Amazon Web Services blog, individuals, businesses and organizations are putting data in Amazon's EC2 S3 storage service at an incredible rate. The blog reports:

"As of the end of 2011, there are 762 billion (762,000,000,000) objects in Amazon S3. We process over 500,000 requests per second for these objects at peak times."

Amazon is also reporting that year-over-year growth in objects stored is a whopping 192 percent. That rate of growth is faster than it has been for any year since the service launched in 2006, and it is clear that cloud computing will remain a major business focus for Amazon for as far as the eye can see.

Amazon's report even ends with a list of open positions on its S3 team, reflecting the strong growth the division is seeing. And, Amazon has recently been cutting entry-level prices for cloud storage.

As open source competitors to Amazon seek to differentiate themselves, they need to offer flexible, well supported platforms that businesses can take seriously. Citrix's CloudStack platform does promise to compete that way, and OpenStack has momentum and backers.

Still, it's clear from Amazon's summary of its cloud efforts in 2011 that it is the 800-pound gorilla in the cloud, still growing the number of objects stored on S3 at nearly 200 percent per year.

For much more on open source competitors to Amazon in the cloud, including a series of interviews with leaders of open source cloud platforms, see our post here.