Tag: AWS products

The Most Popular and Fastest-Growing AWS Products of 2021

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%s” and the “Up-and-Comers.” The 100%s 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.

12 Essential AWS Products

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.

AWS Trending Products and Services

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.

Emerging Technology

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.

-Joey Yore, Principal Consultant


AWS re:Invent 2019: AWS Product/Service Review, a Networking Perspective

Announcements for days!

AWS re:Invent 2019 has come and gone, and now the collective audience has to sort through the massive list of AWS announcements released at the event.  According to the AWS re:Invent 2019 Recap communication, AWS released 77 products, features and services in just 5 days!  Many of the announcements were in the Machine Learning (ML) space (20 total), closely followed by announcements around Compute (16 total), Analytics (6 total), Networking and Content Delivery (5 total), and AWS Partner Network (5 total), amongst others.   In the area of ML, things like AWS DeepComposer, Amazon SageMaker Studio, and Amazon Fraud Detector topped the list.  While in the Compute, Analytics, and Networking space, Amazon EC2 Inf1 Instances, AWS Local Zones, AWS Outposts, Amazon Redshift Data lake, AWS Transit Gateway Network Manager, and Inter-Region Peering were at the forefront. Here at 2nd Watch we love the cutting-edge ML feature announcements like everyone else, but we always have our eye on those announcements that key-in on what our customers need now – announcements that can have an immediate benefit for our customers in their ongoing cloud journey.

All About the Network

In Matt Lehwess’ presentation, Advanced VPC design and new capabilities for Amazon VPC, he kicked off the discussion with a poignant note of, “Networking is the foundation of everything, it’s how you build things on AWS, you start with an Amazon VPC and build up from there. Networking is really what underpins everything we do in AWS.  All the services rely on Networking.” This statement strikes a chord here at 2nd Watch as we have seen that sentiment in action. Over the last couple years, our customers have been accelerating the use of VPCs, and, as of 2018, Amazon VPCs is the number one AWS service used by our customers, with 100% of them using it. We look for that same trend to continue as 2019 comes to an end.  It’s not the sexiest part of AWS, but networking provides the foundation that brings all of the other services together.  So, focusing on newer and more efficient networking tools and architectures to get services to communicate is always at the top of the list when we look at new announcements.  Here are our takes on these key announcements.

AWS Transit Gateway Inter-Region Peering (Multi-Region)

One exciting feature announcement in the networking space is Inter-Region Peering for AWS Transit Gateway.  This feature allows the ability to establish peering connections between Transit Gateways in different AWS Regions.  Previously, connectivity between two Transit Gateways could only be done through a Transit VPC which included the overhead of running your own networking devices as part of the Transit VPC.   Inter-Region peering for AWS Transit Gateway enables you to remove the Transit VPC and connect Transit Gateways directly.

The solution uses a new static attachment type called a Transit Gateway Peering Attachment that, once created, requires an acceptance or rejection from the accepter Transit Gateway.  In the future, AWS will likely allow dynamic attachments, so they advise you to create unique ASNs for each Transit Gateway for the easiest transition.  The solution also uses encrypted VPC peering across the AWS backbone.  Currently Transit Gateway inter-region peering support is available for gateways in US East (Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), and EU (Frankfurt) AWS Regions with support for other regions coming soon.  You also can’t peer Transit Gateways in the same region.

(Source: Matt Lehwess: Advanced VPC design and new capabilities for Amazon VPC (NET305))

On the surface the ability to connect two Transit Gateways is just an incremental additional feature, but when you start to think of the different use cases as well as the follow-on announcement of Multi-Region Transit Gateway peering and Accelerated VPN solutions, the options for architecture really open up.  This effectively enables you to create a private and highly-performant global network on top of the AWS backbone.  Great stuff!

AWS Transit Gateway Network Manager

This new feature is used to centrally monitor your global network across AWS and on premises. The Transit Gateway network manager simplifies operational complexity of managing networks across regions and remote locations.  This AWS feature is another to take a dashboard approach to provide a simpler overview of your resources that may be spread over several regions and accounts. To use it, you create a Global Network within the tool which is an object in the AWS Transit Gateway Network Manager service that represents your private global network in AWS. It includes your AWS Transit Gateway hubs, their attachments, and on-premises devices, sites, and links.  Once the Global Network is created, you extend the configuration by adding in Transit Gateways, information about your on-premises devices, sites, links, and the Site-to-Site VPN connections with which they are associated, and start using it to visualize and monitor your network. It includes a nice geographic world map view to visualize VPNs (if they’re up/down impaired) or Transit Gateway Peering connections.

https://d1.awsstatic.com/re19/gix/gorgraphic.cdb99cd59ba34015eccc4ce5eb4b657fdf5d9dd6.png

There’s also a nice Topology feature that shows VPCs, VPNs, Direct Connect gateways, and AWS Transit Gateway-AWS Transit Gateway peering for all registered Transit gateways.  It provides an easier way to understand your entire global infrastructure from a single view.

Another key feature is the integration with SD-WAN providers like Cisco, Aviatrix, and others. Many of these solutions will integrate with AWS Transit Gateway Network Manager and automate the branch-cloud connectivity and provide end-to-end monitoring of the global network from a single dashboard. It’s something we look forward to exploring with these SD-WAN providers in the future.

AWS Local Zones

AWS Local Zones in an interesting new service that addresses challenges we’ve encountered with customers.  Although listed under Compute and not Networking and Content Delivery on the re:Invent 2019 announcement list, Local Zones is a powerful new feature with networking at its core.

Latency tolerance for applications stacks running in a hybrid scenario (i.e. app servers in AWS, database on-prem) is a standard conversation when planning a migration.  Historically, those conversations would be predicated by their proximity to an AWS region.  Depending on requirements, customers in Portland, Oregon may have the option to run a hybrid application stack, where those in Southern California may have been excluded.  The announcement of Local Zones (initially just in Los Angeles) opens up those options to markets that were not previously available.  I hope this is the first of many localized resource deployments.

That’s no Region…that’s a Local Zone

Local Zones are interesting in that they only have a subset of the services available in a standard region.  Local Zones are organized as a child of a parent region, notably the Los Angeles Local Zone is a child of the Oregon Region.  API communication is done through Oregon, and even the name of the LA Local Zone AZ maps to Oregon (Oregon AZ1= us-west-2a, Los Angeles AZ1 = us-west-2-lax-1a).  Organizationally, it’s easiest to think of them as remote Availability Zones of existing regions.

As of December 2019, only a limited amount of services are available, including EC2, EBS, FSx, ALB, VPC and single-zone RDS.  Pricing seems to be roughly 20% higher than in the parent region.  Given that this is the first Local Zone, we don’t know whether this will always be true or if it depends on location.  One would assume that Los Angeles would be a higher-cost location whether it was a Local Zone or full region.

All the Things

To see all of the things that were launched at re:Invent 2019 you can check out the re:Invent 2019 Announcement Page. For all AWS announcements, not just re:Invent 2019 launches (e.g. Things that launched just prior to re:Invent), check out the What’s New with AWS webpage. If you missed the show completely or just want to re-watch your favorite AWS presenters, you can see many of the re:Invent presentations on the AWS Events Youtube Channel. After you’ve done all that research and watched all those videos and are ready to get started, you can always reach out to us at 2nd Watch. We’d love to help!

-Derek Baltazar, Managing Consultant

-Travis Greenstreet, Principal Architect


The Cloudcast Podcast with Jeff Aden, Co-Founder and EVP at 2nd Watch

The Cloudcast’s Aaron and Brian talk with Jeff Aden, Co-Founder and EVP at 2nd Watch, about the evolution of 2nd Watch as a Cloud Integrator as AWS has grown and shifted its focus from startups to enterprise customers. Listen to the podcast at http://www.thecloudcast.net/2019/02/evolution-of-public-cloud-integrator.html.

Topic 1 – Welcome to the show Jeff. Tell us about your background, the founding of 2nd Watch, and how the company has evolved over the last few years.

Topic 2 – We got to know 2nd Watch at one of the first AWS re:Invent shows, as they had one of the largest booths on the floor. At the time, they were listed as one of AWS’s best partners. Today, 2nd Watch provides management tools, migration tools, and systems-integration capabilities. How does 2nd Watch think of themselves?

Topic 3 –  What are the concerns of your customers today, and how does 2nd Watch think about matching customer demands and the types of tools/services/capabilities that you provide today?

Topic 4 – We’d like to pick your brain about the usage and insights you’re seeing from your customers’ usage of AWS. It’s mentioned that 100% are using DynamoDB, 53% are using Elastic Kubernetes, and a fast growing section is using things likes Athena, Glue and Sagemaker. What are some of the types of applications that you’re seeing customer build that leverage these new models? 

Topic 5 – With technologies like Outpost being announced, after so many years of AWS saying “Cloud or legacy Data Center,” how do you see this impacting the thought process of customers or potential customers?


The Most Popular AWS Products of 2018

Big Data and Machine Learning Services Lead the Way

If you’ve been reading this blog, or otherwise following the enterprise tech market, you know that the worldwide cloud services market is strong. According to Gartner, the market is projected to grow by 17% in 2019, to over $206 billion.

Within that market, enterprise IT departments are embracing cloud infrastructure and related services like never before. They’re attracted to tools and technologies that enable innovation, cost savings, faster-time-to-market for new digital products and services, flexibility and productivity. They want to be able to scale their infrastructure up and down as the situation warrants, and they’re enamored with the idea of “digital transformation.”

In its short history, cloud infrastructure has never been more exciting. At 2nd Watch, we are fortunate to have a front-row seat to the show, with more than 400 enterprise workloads under management and over 200,000 instances in our managed public cloud. With 2018 now in our rearview mirror, we thought this a good time for a quick peek back at the most popular Amazon Web Services (AWS) products of the past year. We aggregated and anonymized our AWS customer data from 2018, and here’s what we found:

The top five AWS products of 2018 were: Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (used by 100% of 2nd Watch customers); AWS Data Transfer (100%); Amazon Simple Storage Service (100%); Amazon DynamoDB (100%) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (100%). Frankly, the top five list isn’t surprising. It is, however, indicative of legacy workloads and architectures being run by the enterprise.

Meanwhile, the fastest-growing AWS products of 2018 were: Amazon Athena (68% CAGR, as measured by dollars spent on this service with 2nd Watch in 2018 v. 2017); Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (53%); Amazon MQ (37%); AWS OpsWorks (23%); Amazon EC2 Container Service (21%); Amazon SageMaker (21%); AWS Certificate Manager (20%); and AWS Glue (16%).

The growth in data services like Athena and Glue, correlated with Sagemaker, is interesting. Typically, the hype isn’t supported by the data, but clearly, customers are moving forward with big data and machine learning strategies. These three services were also the fastest growing services in Q4 2018.

Looking ahead, I expect EKS to be huge this year, along with Sagemaker and serverless. Based on job postings and demand in the market, Kubernetes is the most requested skill set in the enterprise. For a look at the other AWS products and services that rounded out our list for 2018, download our infographic.

– Chris Garvey, EVP Product


The Most Popular AWS Products of 2016

We know from the past 5 years of Gartner Magic Quadrants that AWS is a leader among IaaS vendors, placing the furthest for ‘completeness of vision’ and ‘ability to execute.’ AWS’ rapid pace of innovation contributes to its position as the leader in the space. The cloud provider releases hundreds of product and service updates every year. So, which of those are the most popular amongst our enterprise clients?

We analyzed data from our customers for the year, from a combined 100,000+ instances running monthly. The most popular AWS products and services, represented by the percentage of 2nd Watch customers utilizing them in 2016, include Amazon’s two core services for compute and storage – EC2 and S3 – and Amazon Data Transfer, each at 100% usage. Other high-ranking products include Simple Queue Service (SQS) for message queuing (84%) and Amazon Relational Database Service or RDS (72%). Usage for these services remains fairly consistent, and we would expect to see these services across most AWS deployments.

There are some relatively new AWS products and services that made the “most-popular” list for 2016 as well. AWS Lambda serverless computing (38%), Amazon WorkSpaces, a secure virtual desktop service (27%), and Kinesis, a real-time streaming data platform (12%), are quickly being adopted by AWS users and rising in popularity.

The fas-growing services in 2016, based on CAGR, include AWS CloudTrail (48%), Kinesis (30%), Config for resource inventory, configuration history, and change notifications (24%), Elasticsearch Service for real-time search and analytics (22%), Elastic MapReduce, a tool for big data processing and analysis, (20%) and Redshift, the data warehouse service alternative to systems from HP, Oracle and IBM (14%).

The accelerated use of these products demonstrates how quickly new cloud technologies are becoming the standard in today’s evolving market. Enterprises are moving away from legacy systems to cloud platforms for everything from back-end systems to business-critical, consumer-facing assets. We expect growth in each of these categories to continue as large organizations realize the benefits and ease of using these technologies.

Download the 30 Most Popular AWS Products infographic to find out which others are in high-demand.

-Jeff Aden, Co-Founder & EVP Business Development & Marketing


And the top AWS products of Q1 2016 are…

AWS is an innovation lab. The world’s top cloud provider releases hundreds of updates and dozens of major services every year. So, which products are companies loving right now?

We analyzed data from our customers, across a combined 100,000+ instances running monthly, for Q1 of 2016. The most popular AWS products, represented by the percentage of 2nd Watch customers deploying them in the first quarter, include Amazon S3 for storage and Data Transfer (100% each), EC2 (99%), SNS or Simple Notification Service (89%) and Key Management Service for encryption (87%). These services are standard in most AWS deployments, and have been consistent in the last year or so – no surprises here.

Perhaps less predictable was the use of other AWS products, such as Redshift, the data warehouse service introduced in 2012 as a low-cost alternative to systems from HP, Oracle and IBM. The fact that 17% of our customers are using Redshift demonstrates how quickly innovative cloud technology can carve a strong position in a legacy software market. Enterprises are starting to move away from legacy systems to Redshift because it can handle massive quantities of data with exceptional response times.

Other relatively new AWS products making rapid progress with AWS users include the high-performing NoSQL database service Dynamo DB (27%), Lambda, an automated compute management platform (21%) and Workspaces, a secure virtual desktop service (19%).

Just three years ago, enterprises were primarily using the core compute and storage services on AWS. As companies become more comfortable moving business-critical IT assets into the cloud, they’re more likely to leverage the broader AWS portfolio. We expect growth in areas such as database, desktop and management tools to continue in the coming months.

Download the Top 30 AWS Products infographic to find out which others made the list.

-Jeff Aden, EVP Strategic Business Development & Marketing