Thanks to the amazing AWS community, the results are in for the fourth annual Answers for AWS survey. With four years of data, the trends continue to be fascinating.

Let's start with the winners:

• Simple Notification Service (SNS) is the most loved AWS service once again with an outstanding positive/negative split — 98% of people would use it again versus just 2% who wouldn't 🎉.
• GitHub Actions continues its dominance, winning both usage (85.8%) and retention (93.9%) in the CI/CD category for the third year in a row!
• OpenTofu rockets to the top of IaC retention at 91.6%, surpassing Terraform in the infrastructure tools category.
• Amazon Bedrock tops AI & ML retention at 96.3%, while OpenAI still leads usage at 78.3%.
• Claude Code leads both usage and retention in the new AI SDLC category, with 94.4% retention.

Other notable highlights include:

• S3 Tables has the highest interest of any service in the survey at 88.1% — keep an eye on this one.
• DynamoDB maintains its commanding lead in the NoSQL category with 92.3% usage.
• SQS achieves near-perfect retention at 98.1% in the Events category.
• Fargate tops container retention at 95.3%, continuing the trend toward managed compute.

Thank you to everyone who participated! If you'd like to help with the analysis, please reach out on LinkedIn.

The 2027 survey will open in January so if you'd like to have your voice heard, please sign up to be notified.