The last few years, RightScale has been surveying organizations and putting together the annual “State of the Cloud Report”. The survey includes data collected from 997 technical professionals across a broad cross-section of organizations, and focuses on gathering information about their adoption of the Cloud. Some of the metric included in the report show the percentage of organizations utilizing multiple cloud providers, which cloud services they’re using most, and many more very informative metrics.This article provides a summary of some of the key metrics included in the report, but if you’d like the full State of the Cloud report you can download it directly from RightScale.

Polynimbus (Multi-Cloud) FTW!

The vast majority of Enterprises are choosing a Polynimbus (or Multi-Cloud) strategy for Cloud computing. According to the report, “81% of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy.”

Microsoft Azure on the rise!

The top cloud provider in 2018 is still Amazon AWS, with Microsoft Azure in close second place. However, Microsoft Azure is closing in on AWS and shortening the gap between the two cloud providers. The reach of Microsoft Azure is currently at 70% that of Amazon AWS. This is the closest they’ve been, thanks to the strong gains Microsoft Azure has had in the last year.

Also, the report shows that even though the adoption of AWS and Azure are relatively close, with strong competition, they are well ahead of the rest of the competition with Google Cloud the closest, yet still far behind.

Containers are almost as exciting as Serverless!

There’s lots of excitement and buzz in the cloud computing industry around Docker and Containers. While, Container-as-a-Service offerings in the cloud very popular, it’s Serverless that tops the list of cloud service growth for 2018.

Which Cloud Services are being used and researched?

An interesting metric in the report is the rankings of which public cloud services are being used by enterprises. To help make this article more accessible, the following list illustrates what is shown in the above graphic for the most used cloud services.

1. Relational BDaaS (Database-as-a-Service)
2. Push Notifications
3. Caching
4. Queuing
5. NoSQL DBaaS (Database-as-a-Service)
6. Mobile Services
7. Search
8. Data Warehouse
9. Serverless
10. Container-as-a-Service
11. Batch
12. DRaaS
13. Hadoop
14. Stream Processing
15. Machine Learning
16. Internet of Things (IoT) Services

At the top of the list of most used Cloud Services is Relational Database Services, followed by mostly data related services, with the bottom of the list of the top 16 being finished with Machine Learning and Internet of Things (IoT) Services. However this is likely to change over the coming year, as the services with the most experimentation in 2018 are:

1. Containers-as-a-Service
2. Machine Learning
3. Serverless
4. Internet of Things (IoT) Services

These number give the impression that Serverless, Containers, IoT, and Machine Learning have potential to be either at the top of the list or at the least much higher up the list in next years report.

Cost Savings is Focus #1

Out of the many initiatives, included in the report, that top the list of cloud priorities for enterprises, the top of the list is “Optimizing existing cloud use (cost savings)”. This is followed by “Moving more workloads to cloud”, and “Better financial reporting”. The report shows that “58% of cloud users cite cost savings as top focus for 2018”.

Security Tops Cloud Challenges for Enterprises

In 2017, the Top Cloud Challenges were tied between Security, Managing cloud spend, and Lack of resources/expertise. In 2018, they differ slightly, with Security toping the list, with Managing cloud spend a very close second, and Lack of resources/expertise at third.

Personally I would argue that these top 3 challenges are very closely related. It’s certainly important to have Security be a primary concern in the current IT landscape we find ourselves in. However, one of the likely reasons Security is posing to be a top challenge is that enterprises don’t have enough of the skill / expertise necessary to make it easier to implement. Additionally, the challenges of Managing cloud spend and reducing cloud costs certainly becomes easier when enterprises have IT Professionals trained with the skills and expertise to fully utilize all the various cloud capabilities to better optimize hosting and cost.

I just pulled out a few interesting metrics from the report for this article, and provides some of my own insights into the numbers. The full State of the Cloud report is very objective and full of statistics surveyed. If you’d like the full State of the Cloud report you can download it directly from RightScale to get access to the full details of the 2018 annual report.

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