Cloud automation vendor RightScale produces a regular report looking into how organizations are using cloud computing services. The report is a useful empirical addition to the information available in the marketplace - in part because of its breadth - close to 80,000 individuals are invited to complete the survey. And while only 1000 or so people actually responded, those responses cover over 300 enterprises of larger than 1,000 employees - not as extensive as it could be, but still a good glimpse into cloud usage. Less than a quarter of respondents are RightScale customers giving this report more independence than would have otherwise been expected.
Anyway, on to the findings of the report. The key finding in my mind is the growth in the use of cloud service brokers (CSBs). These CSBs can be thought of as an intermediary between cloud vendors and customers - they tend to come in two flavors - technical CSBs and business ones. Technical CSBs provide an automation, management or governance fabric underneath which sit one or more cloud infrastructure products. Business CSBs, on the other hand, are primarily involved with providing a trading interface between cloud vendors and customers.
Mirroring what many of us have been saying about the maturing view towards cloud in the enterprise, it should come as no surprise that cloud is widely regarded as the default way for running applications. Interestingly, and again in line with general commentator sentiment, is that hybrid cloud is increasingly important to customers. Some statistics:
- 93 percent of organizations surveyed are running applications or experimenting with infrastructure-as-a-service
- 82 percent of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy, up from 74 percent in 2014
Also unsurprising, given the maturity of Amazon Web Services and other public cloud vendors is the finding that public cloud leads in breadth of enterprise adoption. Also unsurprising that in terms of adopted breadth, private clouds leads in workloads:
- 88 percent of organizations are using public cloud while 63 percent are using private cloud
- 13 percent of enterprises run more than 1000 VMs in public cloud, while 22 percent of organizations run more than 1000 VMs in private cloud
- Enterprises anticipate growing public cloud workloads more quickly
There would seem to be plenty of opportunity for cloud adoption within organizations to be expanded greatly. The survey found that:
- 68 percent of enterprises run less than a fifth of their application portfolio in the cloud
- 55 percent of enterprises report that a significant portion of their existing application portfolio is not in cloud, but is built with cloud-friendly architectures
In a finding the speaks to the move to creating self-service IT organizations, it seems that central IT teams increasingly take the reins to broker cloud services:
- 62 percent of enterprises report that central IT makes the majority of cloud spending decisions
- 43 percent of IT teams are offering a self-service portal for access to cloud services, with an additional 41 percent planning or developing a portal
The dual trends towards DevOps and the rise of Docker are highlighted in this report. RightScale found that:
- Overall DevOps adoption rises to 66 percent, with enterprises reaching 71 percent.
- Chef and Puppet are used by 28 and 24 percent of organizations respectively.
- Docker, in its first year, is already used by 13 percent of organizations with a whopping 35 percent of organizations planning to use.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to dominate in public cloud, but Azure makes inroads among enterprises.
- Overall, AWS adoption is 57 percent while Azure IaaS is second at 12 percent, up from 6 percent in 2014.
- Among enterprise respondents, Azure IaaS narrows the gap with 19 percent adoption as compared to AWS with 50 percent.
- The rebranded vCloud Air comes in with 7 percent adoption among enterprises, behind AWS, Azure, Rackspace and Google.
In a follow up post, the company looked at Platform as a Service (PaaS) adoption among enterprises. Some interesting findings from there:
- Users of PaaS were likely to also be using an IaaS offering
- Interestingly, customers of Microsoft Azure were using more IaaS than PaaS. Meanwhile Google customers tended towards PaaS usage
- Compared to 57 percent of respondents who are running applications in AWS, 15 percent are running applications in either Azure IaaS or PaaS, and 10 percent are running applications in either Google IaaS or PaaS.
Unsurprisingly, the survey found that overall there is much higher IaaS adoption than PaaS. IaaS is used more than PaaS among Azure users, while PaaS is used more among Google users. Both Azure and Google have seen stronger growth of IaaS adoption over the past year compared to their PaaS offerings.
We're entering a time where IT decision makers are far more advanced in their choices - the move to a relatively sophisticated hybrid cloud approach, and a broadening in the number of workloads running on the cloud bodes well for the future.
