Last Year in AWS

The survey results are in: key findings and insights from 979 respondents — including the correct pronunciation of AMI

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At the beginning of 2018, I sent out a survey about cloud usage via a variety of social media channels — most notably my sarcastic AWS newsletter. After collecting and carefully analyzing the data from over 900 respondents, the results and insights are ready to be shared.

Before we review the results, I’d like to point out a few things:

1. I’m not a statistician. Survey design is something I approach with great enthusiasm — but little skill.
2. This survey was sent to my audience which biases heavily toward users of the AWS platform. As best I can tell, so does the world.
3. This is designed to be more entertaining than scientific. That said, I did winkle out a few interesting data points which could serve as a launching point for something that isn’t actively ridiculous.

Let’s get to it!

What’s your job function?

The survey started by trying to get an idea for who my respondents were — so I asked them about their job function. Over 70% of the people survey identified as a developer of engineer that writes code.

Note that either some people serve multiple functions, or we just broke math.

Which cloud provider do you use?

Now that we’ve understand their mind, let’s go for the heart. The survey asked individuals to select which solution they are using for their data center.

As expected, almost everyone is using AWS — although almost a third of all respondents also have on-premise environments. Regarding the “other” category, Digital Ocean accounted for the majority of entries which I neglected to include as a response option. I told you I’m terrible at this!

Ignoring AWS, there’s interesting data here.

What is your primary region?

Now let’s figure out why people are so angry all of the time. AWS spans 18 geographic regions around the world — each providing multiple, physically separated and isolated availability zones.

US East (Northern Virginia) is the oldest of the regions — launched in 2006. The us-east-1 region also contains the largest number (6) of availability zones. It’s no surprise that almost 42% of respondents use that region as their primary — and why people get so upset when us-east-1 has a hiccup.

A disturbing number of responses came from us-tirefire-1.

Angry Word Cloud

When asked free-form “What could AWS announce tomorrow that would make you so angry that you ragequit your job and go raise goats in the hills instead?” people had many, many thoughts. Let’s get a word cloud!

I was appalled by how frequently “Oracle” showed up in the results.

Happy Word Cloud

Asked the other side of the question, “What could AWS announce tomorrow that would make you so happy that you rename your child after the company?” people had somewhat different responses.

I interpret this as a “Managed Free AWS Service.” Sounds good to me.

Level of AWS Usage

I was curious about the level of technical sophistication of people’s companies. As is congruent with my brand, I asked the survey question in a slightly insulting way:

Sure enough, the response mirrors the results of other surveys — a plurality of respondents are using the basic “building block” services for most of their work, but serverless and its ilk aren’t far behind.

How do you deploy?

To learn a bit more about the level of automation, I asked about the automation of deployments. I was taken a bit by surprise when I saw the results for how people provision — let’s take a look:

For most of the time this survey was open, CloudFormation and Terraform were neck and neck. This feels like the cloud version of vim vs emacs.

How do you pronounce AMI?

A “golden image” that instances are provisioned from are called an Amazon Machine Image, or AMI. In most right thinking places, people pronounce that as an abbreviation — with all three letters being spoken. And then there’s Amazon itself. At AWS, and nowhere else, they pronounce it “ah-mee.”

They are wrong.

14% of respondents are professionally wrong.

What’s my problem?

The survey offered some other interesting data points:

• On a scale of 1–5, respondents ranked their proficiency with AWS at a mean of 3.9.
• 57.4% of respondents work in pure Linux shops.

I also asked people to tell me what my problem is. Oof. I was accused of being an AWS shill. I was accused of being entirely too harsh on AWS itself. People wanted me to email more and less. People wanted a podcast (I started one!), and people wanted me to do videos instead.

“Ask me about my narcissism!”

Thank you all, for the feedback. Follow me on Twitter if you’d like to hear more of my nonsense — or subscribe to my weekly newsletter.