Users considering using infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platforms should look at user case histories for guidance for which workloads might best be developed on or migrated to public cloud, writes Wikibon Consultant Ralph Finos. An analysis of the brief descriptions of 650 customer solution stories on Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS) shows, unsurprisingly, that it is a huge incubator of cloud-based startups. However, it also shows that “the digital piranhas disrupting global industries” – such as Airbnb Inc., Lyft Inc., Pinterest Inc., Expedia Inc. and Spotify AB — often stay on AWS as they grow. And it shows that a majority of traditional enterprises use AWS at the departmental level.

Sixty-three percent of the companies profiled are born-in-the-cloud. Nine percent are media companies that use it for content management and distribution. The remaining 28 percent are mainstream enterprises in multiple industries.

Among the traditional enterprises, 56 percent are running departmental or workload-specific — not IT-driven — workloads. These include marketing, engineering and content management. Eleven percent are migrating modules such as billing apps, Sharepoint or order entry from on-premises installations to AWS. Finos sees these as mostly experiments.

AWS has begun a strategic push to recruit customers interested in moving workloads off-prem. This may in part be a reaction to the IBM, Oracle and Microsoft, which all focus on migrating existing customer workloads to the cloud.

The full Professional Alert, available to Wikibon Premium subscribers, provides more detail on this analysis, which is a window into the state of trends in the IaaS portion of public cloud.

Image courtesy of Amazon Web Services LLC