Many readers have asked me about the diminishing volume of posts here on the blog. Where, they ask, have I wandered off to. The answer is Onavo, the company I co-founded and run, together with the best team I could ever imagine. We’re a cloud-based company building an exciting solution in the mobile space – an app that saves you money (lots of it!) on data roaming. Using your smartphone abroad remains painfully expensive, and we’ve discovered that the cloud can eliminate this pain.

Last week I was at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona where we launched a private beta of our solution, for iPhones. I’ve been given the privilege to offer you, my readers (well, only the first few dozen of you) an invitation to the beta:

Using an iPhone? Go to www.onavo.com and use the code JOAC. If you’re already on your iPhone, simply click the following link: http://onavo.com/joac.

Shameless plug over. More juicy cloud numbers and stats to come.

So let’s say you need a name for your up and coming cloud computing company. Going by most of the names out there right now, it looks like you’re going to write “cloud” on a piece of paper and then rack your brain for some sort of word to sit before or after it. Maybe you’ll start with numbers or meaningless modifiers (see Cloud9, Cloudera, icloud, Cloudant), move on to slightly more relevant options (Cloudscale, Cloudworks, CloudShare), get frustrated, try out a few stronger sounding words (Cloudkick, Whamcloud), and land, finally, in the territory of completely unrelated modifiers (Panda Cloud, CloudBerry). You’ll eventually find an available URL and subsequently try to convince yourself that naming your company “ChowderCloud” sounds like an okay idea. At least it kind of rolls off the tongue, right?

“Cloud” doesn’t even look like a real word by the end of the massive list of companies using it in their name. So what’s next if your friends talk you out of ChowderCloud? Earth, Wind and Fire? A more general theme of atmosphere? Surrounded by crowded airspace with names like Cumulux, OpenNebula, and Skytap, you decide to turn to something more grounded (see StrikeIron IronCloud, for instance).

While the cloud metaphor is way overplayed, the general concept remains an interesting one with a lot of room for imaginative names. Reservoir, Manymoon, Amazon’s Beanstalk, and StrikeIron (minus the IronCloud) all tap into the basic idea behind cloud computing without going the obvious cloudy route. From a functional standpoint, these less literal names also don’t pigeonhole you if you ever try to expand your business into new territory or shift your focus.

So while names like icloud and Couldworks are immediately relevant, they also immediately make you one in a million. How are potential clients supposed to tell everyone apart at first glance? They all sound like they do basically the same thing. And with more and more businesses switching to cloud infrastructure by the day, having a name that shows potential clients why you’re different can really make a big difference.

So let’s hope you decide to use your imagination. Every cloud is different. Ditch Chowdercloud, Cloudiddly, TroutCloud and Cloudsmack. Think about how you’re different from all the others, and start naming from there.

Snapshot for January 2011

In this month’s update, following some refreshed IP block info integrated into the survey, Rackspace’s numbers look better than ever – they can be proud to be just a hair away from the top spot. For all intents and purposes, in this survey Amazon EC2 and the Rackspace Cloud are tied at first place.

Trends

At this level of zoom, the red and blue merge into one line. What will happen next month… stay tuned!

The numbers gathered in that post back in September 2009 showed that approximately 50,000 instances were being spun up every day on EC2 (in the us-east-1 region). So what’s happened since? I joined forces with CloudKick, providers of a cloud management and monitoring platform, to dig up more data. Here’s what we found: (click to expand to an interactive chart)

The chart above plots the number of instances launched per day, from mid-2007 till present day. Growth is, well, unmistakable. A couple of peaks dominate the landscape around February and October 2010, peaks which somewhat correlate to availability of new AWS services (see interactive map). The evidence is highly circumstantial though as I find it hard to draw a direct conclusion on how these specific events pushed the daily launch count as high up as 150,000.

Let’s zoom out now and look at EC2′s growth over the years:

For this chart, we averaged out the instance launch counts over each year (data for 2007 and 2010 may be partial). Based on the results, activity on EC2 has been multiplying several times over every year. The biggest step was 2008-2009, exhibiting 375% growth (that’s almost 5X). 2009 was the year AWS really exploded, but what strikes me as odd is that growth actually slowed down the following year (to 121%). One theory would be that the cloud has begun to saturate the early adopters and it is truly time to cross the chasm. Crossing, however, is turning out to be a difficult feat.

Responding to my previous research, a top Amazon official commented that a count of instance launches doesn’t really reflect anything meaningful (like the actual customer base, server count or revenues – all of which we’d all love to figure out). I respond that it’s examining the numbers one year later that provides the real value: it’s like looking at a mysterious dial on your car’s dashboard: even without understanding the exact parameter measured, if it shoots up then there’s a decent chance you’re driving faster.

Methodology

State of the Cloud is an on-going survey of the market penetration of cloud computing. Specifically, the survey tracks publicly facing websites (i.e., www.something.com) and does not look into internal usage such as R&D, testing and enterprise use.

The technique used is as follows: I use QuantCast’s top 1M site list as a reference. taking the top half of the list (500k sites in total). Each site is queried to determine whether it is hosted on a cloud provider, and if so on which. The results can be seen below.

Snapshot for November 2010

Here are the results for this month.

The two market leaders continue to make significant gains, both gaining an average of 2.6% per month over the past two month. Both have more than doubled their footprint since I started measuring back in August 2009. All the rest but Joyent have exhibited slower – if steady – growth. We’ve been wondering for over a year if anyone will rise to challenge the dominance of Amazon and Rackspace. So far, that hasn’t happened.

Trends

Looking back over the time since the survey began, what jumps out more than anything is how the cloud as a whole has grown. The cloud has more than doubled – from 3,635 sites hosted in the cloud back in August 2009 to 7,845 today. Otherwise the picture remains pretty static, with a clear division into major league and minor league. Perhaps the only exception here is Linode – which I continue to predict will be grabbed up sooner or later by a large player looking to make a quick entry into the cloud space (much as SliceHost was acquired by Rackspace and became Rackspace Cloud Servers, measured above).

I’d like to open up the floor to contributions from others in the cloud computing space. Whether you’re an independent consultant or a large vendor, if you have some interesting, verifiable data to share then I’d be happy to hear about it. The guideline is this: Jack of all Clouds is about innovative research and hard numbers. If you’re looking for a platform for general commentary, this ain’t it. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that (-: ).

This is a win-win proposition: you get an opportunity to share your findings in an established venue with a readership that includes vendors, providers, customers and market analysts. Jack of all Clouds gains quality content.

Interested? Reach out to guy at jackofallclouds.com

Snapshot for September 2010

Here are the results for this month.

This month Amazon regains the edge lost last month with solid 8% growth since August. However, this month Rackspace takes a hit, losing over 5% of the sites hosted. Looks, however, may be deceiving – there seems to have been a blip in the Quantcast data set used as input, which resulted in quite a number of sites dropping completely from the top 500k. It’s not immediately clear why Rackspace would be hit more than others, but since most of these are now back in their former ranks then next month’s data should correct the trends.

Trends

Coming up

It’s been a year since the groundbreaking Anatomy of an EC2 Resource ID research, that shed light on the volume of usage Amazon’s cloud is seeing. Later this month we’ll go back to see how much has changed in the past year. Stay tuned!

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.

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.

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:

But first, this month’s figures –

Looking at this month’s trends, we find a relatively slow month for the cloud. Overall growth was just 1.7%. The largest month-to-month percentage growth goes to OpSource which grew by 11%. In terms of absolute size, Rackspace grew the most with 70 new sites. Amazon gained just 10 new sites this month.

Let’s take a look at cloud providers from another angle. We last did this back in February.

Our first conclusion: Amazon now controls more than 50% of cloud-hosted sites. The second conclusion: by this metric at least, the cloud race continues to be a two-horse race: Amazon and Rackspace together control 94%, and all the rest of the providers retain but a sliver of control.

Many of the smaller providers have had a weak month, some even showing up less this month in the sample than they did previously. Only Amazon and Rackspace continue to plough ahead with Amazon gaining 6% and Rackspace 3%.

Overall cloud growth this month is at 3.9% (=58% CAGR).