Tim’s recent tweet on the growing demand for Google App Engine skills inspired me to measure the popularity of the major cloud computing platforms. Elance is one of many job boards in our data warehouse of U.S. job postings1 , and I wanted to measure demand across many more job sites.
Measured in terms of (U.S.) job postings, Amazon’s Cloud Computing platform is still larger than Google’s App Engine. What’s interesting is that the gap has closed over the past year2:
Over the past two months, the other cloud platforms were roughly one-third (Google), one-fourth (Microsoft), and one-sixth (Rackspace) the size of Amazon. During the same period last year, these platforms were much smaller: Google was one-fifth, Microsoft was one-seventh, and Rackspace one-tenth the size of Amazon.
(1) Data for this post is for U.S. online job postings through 8/21/2010 and is maintained in partnership with SimplyHired.com. We use algorithms to dedup job posts: a single job posting can contain multiple jobs and appear on multiple job sites.
(2) I counted the number of unique job posts that mention each of the cloud computing platforms.