The pace of technology change is accelerating, especially in the cloud. For a gauge, we did a simple analysis of Amazon AWS product announcements since their early days in 2005. In 2017 AWS eclipsed one thousand AWS product announcements for the year, and announcements are growing on average 56% each year. That’s faster than the growth rate Gordon Moore famously predicted for integrated circuit density.
AWS Announcements 2017
Amazon is at a pace of 3 significant updates every day of the year. In the month of November alone, there were 193 product announcements leading up to the AWS re:Invent conference.
Five years ago there were 147 announcements for the entire year. Ten years ago there were just 11.
Amazon now lists almost one hundred distinct AWS services, grown from nothing just 12 years earlier.
This is just one cloud provider. I would expect a similar pace from Microsoft, Google, and others.
I know… product announcements are a really subjective and pliable measure compared to Moore’s transistor counts, but the pace of cloud innovation is amazing.