2020 in Review

The year is coming to an end. We want to say thank you to our clients, partners, supporters, and readers. We are fortunate that our business is growing steadily even during the pandemic. In this blog post, we look back on the past year and dare a look at the next year.

Content

We love blogging and published 61 articles on cloudonaut.io this year. Those articles have been read more than 1,200,000 times in 2020.
We also dropped 26 podcast episodes with ~30,000 downloads & streams.
Besides that, we launched cloudonaut plus in November, where we publish weekly video content for AWS professionals. Our archive already contains 17 videos.

The following articles attracted the most attention in 2020:

• I’m losing trust in AWS. SNS is broken for 65 days.
• ECS vs. Fargate: What’s the difference?
• CloudFormation vs. Terraform
• Have you replaced IAM Users with AWS SSO yet?
• EKS vs. ECS: orchestrating containers on AWS
• Review: API Gateway HTTP APIs - Cheaper and Faster REST APIs?
• Advanced AWS Networking: Pitfalls That You Should Avoid
• 6 unknown CloudFormation features you should know about

Open Source

Andreas and Michael made more than 3,000 contributions in the last year (according to GitHub). That’s ~13 contributions per working day! Our most popular repositories are:

• aws-cf-templates with 2,100 stars
• cfn-modules
• complete-aws-iam-reference
• learn-cloudformation

Our open source projects do not contribute directly to revenue.

Consulting business

We served 15 different consulting clients in 2020, including startups, SMEs, and large enterprises. All projects have one thing in common: We support teams during their transition to AWS.
We made ~85% of our revenue in 2020 from our consulting business.

Product & SaaS business

We made significant investments in our product & SaaS businesses this year.

1. We integrated our chatbot for AWS Monitoring with Microsoft Teams in August (besides our Slack integration). We see more than twice the number of new teams joining marbot every week since then—a huge success.
2. Our product bucketAV - Antivirus for Amazon S3 is used by hundreds of clients worldwide to protect their S3 buckets from malware, trjoans, viruses and other threats. We continue to receive tremendous feedback from our customers, which we use to enhance the product further.
3. We launched the Rapid Docker on AWS Video Course in January and are very happy with the results. Many customers enjoy both the ebook and the video course.

In total, 15% of our revenue was generated by our product business in 2020.

Outlook

We will focus on our subscription offering cloudonaut plus in 2021. We will allocate 45% of our time to produce high-quality content. This includes videos, podcasts, and articles. This will be the most significant financial bet we ever made since we founded our company more than 5 years ago.

We aim to increase the revenue from our product business compared to our consulting business. Our goal is to make 35% of our revenue from our product business in 2021.

Thanks a lot for your support! We wish you a Happy New Year.

Andreas & Michael