RightScale Shows Cloud Adoption Picking Up

RightScale, the cloud computing management vendor looking to create a niche for itself by automating the deployment and management of cloud platforms, today said in a blog post that it has tracked a 1,000 percent increase in its customer cloud infrastructure spend from June 2009 to June 2010. While statistics like this are sometimes little more than PR spin, it’s interesting to dive into the statistics to see what they really mean in terms of cloud adoption in production environments.

The data showcases three trends worth noting: an overall increase in the number of cloud servers in use by RightScale customers, those cloud servers running for longer periods of time, and customers using larger servers than they were a year ago. While the raw number of servers that RightScale customers have in use has grown by nearly 300 percent, the really interesting thing is that customers are using larger instances, reflecting more users, larger databases and a broadening of the services being delivered from the cloud.

RightScale has launched well over a million cloud servers, which gives it a pretty broad view of cloud computing use trends. The insights taken from the adoption patterns of their customers are indicative of the more general state of the uptake rate for cloud computing. As RightScale CTO Thorsten von Eicken said in a press release:

While the cloud market is still in its infancy, we believe the dramatic changes we’ve seen in the past year among our customers are strong indicators of technology maturation and increasing market momentum.

It would be even more interesting to see some fine-grained statistics from Amazon itself, not only raw data like the total number of servers, but an over-time comparison across customers to see how adoption is changing within organizations.