The popularity of cloud-based DBMSs has increased tenfold in four years

by Matthias Gelbmann, 7 February 2017
Tags: Amazon Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Redshift, Amazon SimpleDB, Cloudant, Google BigQuery, Microsoft Azure DocumentDB, Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Cloud-based database management systems are still relatively exotic data storage solutions, adding up to only 1.6% of the popularity of the entire DBMS market. This is, however, a tenfold increase in the last four years.

Cloud-based database management systems are systems that are available only as cloud service. They cannot be installed on premises or on rented servers. While that approach is obviously not suitable for every project, the idea to outsource worries about scalability, availability and security does certainly sound attractive. It should come as no surprise that the popularity of those systems, measured as percentage of the overall popularity of all DBMSs, has increased from just over 0.1% in 2013 to 1.6% in 2017.

Cloud DBMS Trends

None of the cloud-based DBMSs ranks in the top 20 of the DB-Engines Ranking. However, if we look at the trend on the most popular systems, it looks like this is about to change soon. Nearly all of them improved their rank in the last year.

	Popularity rank February 2017	Popularity rank February 2016
Amazon DynamoDB	22	26
Microsoft Azure SQL Database	27	30
Amazon Redshift	31	37
Google BigQuery	37	43
Cloudant	47	50
Microsoft Azure DocumentDB	57	78
Amazon Aurora	62	87
Amazon SimpleDB	68	66

From that list, we can also see the big players in that market: Amazon, Microsoft, Google and IBM. They all have grown in the last years, with Amazon taking the lead:

Cloud DBMS Trends

The fact that could-based services are gaining popularity is not new or surprising, but the speed at which people direct their attention to those DBMSs is remarkable. Our guess is that we have only seen the beginning yet.

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