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2016 State of the Cloud

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

"Hybrid adoption is growing with companies using 6 different clouds on average," said Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale, citing the RightScale 2016 State of the Cloud Survey. "More workloads are moving to public and private clouds; security concerns have abated; cloud cost management challenges are increasing; and Docker is showing phenomenal growth. We also saw changes in the public cloud provider landscape with #2 Azure gaining ground on leader AWS."

Highlights of the report include:

Hybrid Cloud Adoption Grew Significantly

Private cloud adoption increased from 63 percent to 77 percent, driving hybrid cloud adoption up from 58 percent to 71 percent year-over-year.

Cloud Users Leverage 6 Clouds on Average

Cloud users are running applications in an average of 1.5 public clouds and 1.7 private clouds. They are experimenting with an additional 1.5 public clouds and 1.3 private clouds.

More Enterprise Workloads Shift to Cloud, Especially Private Cloud

17 percent of enterprises now have more than 1,000 VMs in public cloud, up from 13 percent in 2014. Private cloud showed even stronger growth with 31 percent of enterprises running more than 1,000 VMs, up from 22 percent in 2014.

Security Is No Longer the Top Cloud Challenge

Lack of resources/expertise is now the #1 cloud challenge (cited by 32 percent), supplanting security (cited by 29 percent).

Cloud Cost Challenges Increase, but Optimization Efforts Lag

26 percent of respondents identify cloud cost management as a significant challenge, a steady increase each year from 18 percent in 2013. Cloud cost management provides a significant opportunity for savings, since few companies are taking critical actions to optimize cloud costs, such as shutting down unused workloads or selecting lower-cost cloud or regions.

DevOps Grows and Docker Spreads Like Wildfire, Especially in the Enterprise

Overall DevOps adoption rises from 66 to 74 percent, with enterprises reaching 81 percent. Overall Docker adoption more than doubles to 27 percent vs. 13 percent in 2015; and another 35 percent have plans to use Docker.

AWS Continues to Lead in Public Cloud Adoption, but Azure (Iaas and PaaS) Gain Ground

Overall, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is used by 57 percent of respondents, flat from last year. Enterprise adoption of AWS grew from 50 percent to 56 percent while adoption by smaller businesses fell slightly from 61 percent to 58 percent. Azure IaaS grows strongly from 12 percent to 17 percent adoption, while Azure PaaS grows from 9 percent to 13 percent.

Private Cloud Adoption Grows Across All Providers

VMware vSphere continues to lead with strong year-over-year growth. 44 percent of all respondents report they use it as a private cloud. OpenStack and VMware vCloud Suite both show strong growth and remain tied at 19 percent adoption overall.

Survey Methodology: RightScale conducted its annual State of the Cloud Survey in January 2016. The survey questioned technical professionals across a broad cross-section of organizations about their adoption of cloud computing. The 1,060 respondents range from technical executives to managers and practitioners and represent organizations of varying sizes across many industries. The margin of error is 3.07 percent.

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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2016 State of the Cloud

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

"Hybrid adoption is growing with companies using 6 different clouds on average," said Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale, citing the RightScale 2016 State of the Cloud Survey. "More workloads are moving to public and private clouds; security concerns have abated; cloud cost management challenges are increasing; and Docker is showing phenomenal growth. We also saw changes in the public cloud provider landscape with #2 Azure gaining ground on leader AWS."

Highlights of the report include:

Hybrid Cloud Adoption Grew Significantly

Private cloud adoption increased from 63 percent to 77 percent, driving hybrid cloud adoption up from 58 percent to 71 percent year-over-year.

Cloud Users Leverage 6 Clouds on Average

Cloud users are running applications in an average of 1.5 public clouds and 1.7 private clouds. They are experimenting with an additional 1.5 public clouds and 1.3 private clouds.

More Enterprise Workloads Shift to Cloud, Especially Private Cloud

17 percent of enterprises now have more than 1,000 VMs in public cloud, up from 13 percent in 2014. Private cloud showed even stronger growth with 31 percent of enterprises running more than 1,000 VMs, up from 22 percent in 2014.

Security Is No Longer the Top Cloud Challenge

Lack of resources/expertise is now the #1 cloud challenge (cited by 32 percent), supplanting security (cited by 29 percent).

Cloud Cost Challenges Increase, but Optimization Efforts Lag

26 percent of respondents identify cloud cost management as a significant challenge, a steady increase each year from 18 percent in 2013. Cloud cost management provides a significant opportunity for savings, since few companies are taking critical actions to optimize cloud costs, such as shutting down unused workloads or selecting lower-cost cloud or regions.

DevOps Grows and Docker Spreads Like Wildfire, Especially in the Enterprise

Overall DevOps adoption rises from 66 to 74 percent, with enterprises reaching 81 percent. Overall Docker adoption more than doubles to 27 percent vs. 13 percent in 2015; and another 35 percent have plans to use Docker.

AWS Continues to Lead in Public Cloud Adoption, but Azure (Iaas and PaaS) Gain Ground

Overall, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is used by 57 percent of respondents, flat from last year. Enterprise adoption of AWS grew from 50 percent to 56 percent while adoption by smaller businesses fell slightly from 61 percent to 58 percent. Azure IaaS grows strongly from 12 percent to 17 percent adoption, while Azure PaaS grows from 9 percent to 13 percent.

Private Cloud Adoption Grows Across All Providers

VMware vSphere continues to lead with strong year-over-year growth. 44 percent of all respondents report they use it as a private cloud. OpenStack and VMware vCloud Suite both show strong growth and remain tied at 19 percent adoption overall.

Survey Methodology: RightScale conducted its annual State of the Cloud Survey in January 2016. The survey questioned technical professionals across a broad cross-section of organizations about their adoption of cloud computing. The 1,060 respondents range from technical executives to managers and practitioners and represent organizations of varying sizes across many industries. The margin of error is 3.07 percent.

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

Hot Topics

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

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In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...