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10 Key Takeaways From RightScale State Of The Cloud Report

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RightScale, the multi-cloud management company, has published their annual report on the state of the cloud adoption. For the last few years, RightScale has been surveying a large number of cloud users to find patterns related to adoption and usage among enterprises and small and medium businesses. The report has gained credibility primarily due to the representation from large organizations that have been cloud users along with beginners who are still testing the waters.

RightScale

This year, RightScale claims to survey over 1000 technical professionals on their adoption of cloud computing across a broad cross-section of organizations.  RightScale sent the survey to 66,783 people from a database that included both customers and non-customers of RightScale. Only 19 percent of the respondents are users of RightScale. Out of the 997 respondents, 525 represented organizations with 1000+ employees while 472 respondents were from the SMB segment.

Here are the key takeaways from the report.

  1. Multi-cloud strategy is becoming a reality

Majority of the public cloud customers are spreading their investments across multiple cloud providers. When compared to last year, hybrid usage is shrinking – 51 percent in 2018 vs. 58 percent in 2017. The intent to use various public clouds is increased by three percent.

RightScale

  1. Public cloud continues to grow among enterprises

Though enterprises are still investing in private cloud, the interest is gradually moving towards the public cloud. Public cloud usage has increased by 7 percent when compared to 2017. The plans to build and maintain a private cloud is declining. The move towards public cloud has also impacted the usage of hybrid cloud.

RightScale

  1. Majority of the container workloads are running on AWS

When it comes to containers, AWS customers seem to lead the adoption. Whether it is plain Docker, self-hosted Kubernetes, or managed offerings such as Amazon ECS/EKS, most of the workloads are running on Amazon EC2. Though Azure and Google are increasing their containers as a service (CaaS) revenue, AWS is leading the pack.

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  1. Kubernetes is the most preferred container orchestration tool among enterprises

When it comes to container orchestration tools, it is Kubernetes that’s winning the market. At least 38 percent of enterprises mentioned that are considering Kubernetes as a container management tool. The other players mostly have a single digit adoption rate.

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  1. Cost and usage optimization are the critical goals for enterprise IT

Across the board, cloud users are focused on optimizing cost and cloud usage. Cost optimization is the top concern for both SMBs and enterprises. Even among enterprise central IT teams, who typically have the most responsibility for security, there has been a significant decline in security concerns among this group. They are now considering optimization as the key concern.

RightScale

  1. Microsoft Azure is growing at the cost of AWS

Though AWS continues to lead in public cloud adoption, other public clouds are growing faster. Azure is now inching closer to AWS, especially in larger companies. Overall Azure adoption increased from 34 to 45 percent (32 percent growth rate) to close the gap with AWS, which resulted in Azure adoption reaching70 percent of AWS adoption, up from 60 percent last year.

RightScale

  1. Azure, IBM Cloud, and GCP are growing considerably

AWS still maintains a lead among enterprises with the highest percentage adoption and largest VM footprint of the top public cloud providers. But, Azure is showing strength by growing much more quickly on already solid adoption numbers. IBM and Google are growing strongly as well but on a smaller base of users.

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  1. VMware is still the king of private cloud market

Though the focus is shifting to the public cloud, VMware continues to be the top player in the private cloud segment. It will be interesting to watch how Azure Stack helps Microsoft in gaining the mindshare and market share.

RightScale

  1. Databases are the number one workload running on cloud

It’s not surprising to see relational databases as the top workload of the public cloud. Almost every application relies on a transactional, relational database. Majority of the participants (44 percent) voted RDBMS as the top public cloud service, which includes both managed database services and self-hosted workloads running in virtual machines.

RightScale

  1. Serverless is witnessing a huge surge in adoption

As cloud adoption reaches a level of maturity, customers are going beyond the core services based on compute, storage and network. Serverless is getting a lot of attention from cloud users. Year over year, serverless was the top-growing extended cloud service with a 75 percent increase over 2017 (12 to 21 percent adoption).

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Bonus 1: Machine learning in the public cloud will see increased traction

After relational database services and container services, it is machine learning that shows promise. While 23 percent of users are already experimenting with ML in the cloud, another 23 percent of respondents are actively considering it. ML as a Service is poised to become one of the most used workloads next year.

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Bonus 2: Ansible is gaining ground in the configuration tools market

As part of adopting DevOps processes, companies often choose to implement configuration management tools that allow them to standardize and automate deployment and configuration of servers and applications. Across enterprise and SMB users, Ansible and Chef are tied with 36 percent adoption each, followed by Puppet at 34 percent adoption. Ansible has shown most substantial growth since last year, up 71 percent in adoption. Chef grew 29 percent, and Puppet increased 21 percent.

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