AWS offers 175 services now. Should you be adopting many of them now?

At this year’s AWS reInvent, we heard Andy Jassy go on stage to announce a bunch of new services to help companies unleash the power of cloud. 27 new services to be exact - everything from Machine learning IDE, to code review tools to contact center offerings (see the full list here); last year, AWS announced another 30 new services ranging from machine learning to VR/AR to satellite data. So now AWS has over 175 services - a staggering count by any imagination. These are great “shiny new toys” tied to hot tech trends, but do enterprises jump in with their two feet to these services? Sumo Logic data says a different story - In reality the likelihood of these services being adopted is pretty small. 

According to our research (Sumo Logic Continuous Intelligence Report 2019), fewer than 10% of AWS services are broadly adopted by the majority of AWS customers.  We found that basic compute, storage, database, network and identity services make up the top 10 adopted services in AWS. In fact, the median services adopted by typical AWS customers is around 15. Out of the 175-plus discrete services marketed and available for consumption in AWS, management, tooling, and advanced security services are adopted at a significantly lower rate than core infrastructure services. 

What gives? Why aren’t enterprises adopting the vast variety of AWS services faster? We believe that there are 3 reasons why enterprises are reticent to adopt AWS services:

#1 Limited support for multi-cloud environments

Multi-cloud is here. Sumo Logic report shows 50% year-over-year increase in multi-cloud adoption.

Enterprises have realized that they need to have a multi-cloud strategy to improve application experience and not be beholden to a single cloud vendor. And many of the “new” AWS services tend to be management systems, they are very focused on the AWS ecosystem and have limited support for non-AWS environments. So its no wonder that enterprises choose to work with 3rd party systems that are more cloud agnostic. These services (like Sumo Logic) support full multi-cloud management - across AWS, Azure and GCP, thus providing choice and eliminating public cloud lock-in. 

#2 Good Beta release. But when will it GA?

AWS is an innovation machine. They release many services throughout the year. But the maturity of these services varies dramatically. And while customers can experiment with these services, it takes a while to get these services to GA state. And many enterprises are loathe to depending on non-production GA offerings for their mission-critical applications. For example, AWS announced the Security Hub security solution at ReInvent 2018. And released it a full six months later at ReInforce 2019. While a great security solution (and Sumo Logic integrates to it), not many enterprises have integrated to it. 

#3 Support for Data/Locale Sovereignty 

One of the many benefits of running on AWS is the ability to globalize solutions with minimal effort. However, global scalability involves particular customer considerations such as data sovereignty and location-specific privacy and regulatory issues. Not all AWS services are available globally from the get-go. In fact, AWS generally rolls out services in few availability zones first before broader and global support. With the heightened sensitivity around data privacy and compliance initiatives like GDPR, enterprises (especially Europe and Asia based)  tend not to adopt services that have local support and residency. And this lack of full support inhibits adoption of many of these services until they are globally available. 

Does any of this mean that the pace of innovation at AWS will slow down any time soon? Far from it. Innovation and experimentation drives AWS. That is what enterprises - including Sumo Logic - loves about this platform. So expect AWS to keep relentlessly pumping out new services. Just don't expect break-neck adoption of these services.