Public cloud stacks in AWS embracing emerging technologies

There are many blogs and articles that speculate on the types of applications being natively deployed and migrated to public cloud. Mobile apps are often pegged as one of the “born in the cloud” categories, though the lack of drill down on whether those are enterprise mobile apps or consumer-grade apps makes it difficult to unequivocally make the case either way. 

So it’s interesting to see any report that drills down into any aspect of apps in the public cloud, particularly if they are generated from real data. Sumo Logic recently did just that, releasing a report that provides valuable insight into applications running in the AWS public cloud. It was compiled from data generated from apps and infrastructure managed by Sumo Logic, carefully anonymized of course. Sumo Logic boasts over a 1000 customers running apps in the AWS cloud and its findings included some very interesting data points around the app stacks being compiled in that environment.

For example, there are a variety of data points out there citing container adoption. Most are derived from surveys conducted within a closed community of container-related technologies, which tends to significantly skew adoption toward higher rates. I’ve seen some citing adoption at 62%. Conversely, surveys conducted across enterprises communities might inadvertently miss those respondents within an organization who are adopting containers, leaving those results skewed to the barely registering levels. Thus, Sumo Logic’s finding that Docker usage in production (in AWS) is approximately 15% is significant, as is the similar rate of Lambda (supporting serverless architectures) adoption.

Also interesting was the finding that “more customers use NoSQL databases than traditional (RDBMS) databases.” Notably down at the bottom of the list were traditional enterprise stalwart RDBMS vendors. That’s not all that surprising. Most enterprises are unlikely to migrate what are extremely large (we’re talking really large) RDBMS’ to any cloud environment. Not only are there challenges with moving ten, twenty, or more years of data to the cloud, but there’s the Cthulu-like tentacles from tens and hundreds of existing (data center bound) apps that rely on that database. But if you’re starting over, it makes sense that one might adopt a newer, more cloud-friendly technology like NoSQL, known for its speed and support within modern app frameworks or go with an open-source option. That said, two of the top four databases in use were NoSQL (Redis tops the chart with 18%, with Mongo slightly behind at 16%) but the other two are traditional, RDBMS: MySQL comfortably in second place at 17% and PostgreSQL in fourth at 11%. 

Finally, Sumo Logic found that “almost two-thirds of AWS applications are using the AWS audit service (CloudTrail) and VPC Flow Logs.” That jives with continued prioritization of security in every industry and market. It also offers some insight into what “cloud services” might need to be integrated with other solutions as cloud-enabled infrastructure and systems continue to appear on the market.

You can download the Sumo Logic report for yourself here, and Sumo Logic tells me they’ll be doing deeper dives in the future so watch for them, as well.