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The latest figures from public cloud management workload provider 2nd Watch has found a significant uptake in network access storage (NAS) products from customers using Amazon Web Services (AWS).

2nd Watch, which manages more than 10,000 AWS instances for enterprise, put together a scorecard showing the hits and misses of Q414. EC2 remains the most popular AWS service, with 98% of customers using it, just ahead of S3 (97%). Amazon’s SNS push notification service was the next most popular (65%), ahead of hosted message queuing service SQS (46%), and relational database RDS (45%).

Yet it was storage that proved the most interesting entry in this quarter’s scorecard, with three SoftNAS services making the top five product rank. SoftNAS Cloud (#2), Cloud Standard (#3) and Cloud Express (#5) all featured, but all behind Barracuda Web Application Firewall which topped the chart. NGINX Plus rounded off the top five.

The majority of users plump for small EC2 types (35%), compared alongside medium (19%), large (17%) and extra large (13%). Performance monitoring analysts Cloud Spectator mused in a January report that EC2 offered “significant” cost advantages over a long term investments, therefore expect this trend to arguably increase in the coming quarters. AWS was also at the summit when CloudHarmony examined the most reliable public cloud providers in 2014.

The average rate for EC2-SQL Server Standard was $0.786, while it was $0.465 for EC2-SQL Server Web. By region, South America ($0.578) was the most expensive, followed by US East ($0.403), EMEA ($0.137), Asia Pacific ($0.135) and US West ($0.125).

Even though EC2-SQL Server Standard was the most expensive on the card, it had dropped from $1.27 in Q314. 2nd Watch attributes this to more companies leveraging the T2 class instance over the traditional M class – and adds that this trend will continue apace for Q115.

Figures from CloudEndure in January found AWS had a 41% reduction in performance issues quarter to quarter during 2014. With these numbers on top, it certainly provides a compelling argument. 2nd Watch has had a busy couple of months itself, announcing its Cloud Factory service to offer a fixed fee migration service to AWS, as well as doubling its revenue in 2014.

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Microsoft has released a series of instruction guides for setting up hybrid cloud environments, including putting together a SharePoint intranet farm and a web-based line of business application in a hybrid cloud.

The tech giant cites a lack of previous resources in this field as the reason for putting pen to paper – while there is plenty of content out there for creating a test environment in a cloud-only virtual network, for instance, hybrid environments have scant documentation in comparison.

For the tutorial on setting up a hybrid cloud environment, the configuration provides a basis and starting point for users to develop and test apps, as well as create test configurations of computers on the Corpnet subnet and within the TestVNET virtual network.

“When complete you can begin performing application development, experimenting with simplified IT workloads, and gauge the performance of a site-to-site VPN connection relative to your location on the Internet,” explained senior content developer Joe Davies in a blog post.

Hybrid has been given a kick start in recent news, thanks to VMware’s announcements about its hybrid cloud strategy going forward, which was then criticised by Red Hat. The open source tech provider described VMware’s vision of a unified platform of virtualised compute, networking and storage for the hybrid cloud was “fundamentally flawed”, adding  that its own solution, through an open hybrid cloud approach, was superior.  

A survey in March 2014 from Microsoft showed almost half (49%) of more than 2000 execs polled had deployed some form of hybrid cloud. These most recent guides, however, show that while the idea of hybrid cloud is a nice one for IT professionals to grasp, setting up and testing a deployment is another issue entirely.

You can find the full documentation here.

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