Dive Brief:

• The bells and whistles of Amazon Web Services cloud products shift in popularity from year to year, but the compute and storage basics continue to reign. In 2016 and 2017, Amazon EC2, S3 and Data Transfer were the most popular products and used by 100% of customers of 2nd Watch, a cloud management company, according to a report based on the company's more than 200,000 AWS instances. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud was also used by 100% of customers in 2017.
• The fastest-growing products year-over-year in 2017 were Amazon X-Ray, Amazon Elastic File System and Amazon Elastic MapReduce.
• "We are seeing enterprise customers adopt new services at a much faster rate than in years' past," said Jeff Aden, co-founder and EVP of Marketing & Strategic Business Development. "Large enterprises are capturing the benefits of cost savings, while decreasing their time-to-market."

Dive Insight:

The cloud is not just about storage anymore.

The market is pushing every player to offer more on their platform. The AWS products rise in use cases in 2017 ran the gamut, from developer tools and application integration to business productivity and security, identity and compliance services. 

AWS may still hold the lion's share of the IaaS market, but Microsoft and Google both hold a substantial footprint in the SaaS and PaaS markets and can work those advantages to their favor.

Having the infrastructure is the first step, but all three leading providers need to make sure they have the products and services to retain current users and attract new ones.