Last year I asked: “Is Amazon Web Services Winning the Cloud Race?” And during the Cloud Connect 2011 keynote this week I made some assertions that AWS is indeed running away with the ball and backed it up with actual numbers[1].

In addition to the keynote, I provided some updated information on AWS releases during panels I moderated this week at Cloud Connect.  Some audience members requested more details. I wanted to provide these details for everyone.

But first as a reminder, here’s the graphic showing Amazon’s development momentum by showing ‘significant’ feature releases per year:

AWS Release Counts by Year AWS Release Counts by Year

This shows a strong development cycle and continued momentum on Amazon’s part.  The light grey bar on the right indicates a rough prediction for releases this year (2011).  If AWS meets this, that would be roughly 5-6 ‘significant’ releases per month.

The source data, originally in a Google Doc, is published here and we appreciate any thoughts or feedbacks you have into our basic methodology shown in ‘decision criteria’ tab.  This is how we decided if something was ‘significant’ or not.

UPDATED: Changes made for clarification due to great feedback from Chris Hoff (@Beaker).

[1] We’re working on posting a full Cloud Connect 2011 update including a link/embed to my keynote.  Probably some time next week.