Summary: More and more enterprises are making significant investments in public cloud, with some adopting Azure public cloud to narrow the gap with AWS public cloud. Despite this, managing cloud platforms remains a challenge for businesses.
Many organizations are advancing their digital transformation plans and projects. As a result, nearly all companies (94%) are embracing “cloudification,” meaning they are adopting cloud computing in some form, as described in the 2019 State of the Cloud report by RightScale.
As organizations become more familiar with a digitally-driven business model, many are choosing to operate in a broader and more diverse IT environment based on multi-cloud.
In fact, multi-cloud is becoming the de facto standard. According to RightScale’s survey, 84% of respondents said they use cloud platforms from four or more cloud providers, including both public and private clouds.
However, 31% of respondents indicated that adopting public cloud is their top priority. These organizations reported plans to increase their spending on public cloud by 24% in 2019 compared to the previous year. This marks another sign of the ongoing rise in public cloud adoption, with public cloud usage (24%) three times that of private cloud usage (8%).
While half of the respondents said they spend over $1.2 million annually on public cloud, 13% reported spending more than $12 million each year.
Azure public cloud continues to grow rapidly, offsetting some of AWS’s lead. Azure adoption increased from 45% to 52%, closing the gap with AWS. Azure adoption now reaches 85% of AWS’s adoption rate, up from 70% last year.
Azure continues to gain ground in the public cloud market, particularly among enterprises, where adoption rose from 58% to 60%, while AWS adoption remained stable at 67%. According to a survey of respondents using cloud computing services, this means Azure now represents 89% of AWS adoption. Google continues to hold the third position in the market, slightly increasing from 18% to 19%.
Other public cloud providers surveyed last year also saw increased adoption rates in 2019, especially among enterprises using VMware Cloud on AWS. These companies grew from 8% to 12% (a 50% increase), Oracle grew from 10% to 16% (a 60% increase), and IBM Cloud grew from 15% to 18% (a 20% increase). Alibaba followed, growing from 2% to 4%.
In the year following the cloud status survey, the proportion of companies adopting a multi-cloud strategy slightly increased from 81% in 2018 to 84%. The percentage of companies planning to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy grew from 51% to 58%. The number of companies using multiple public clouds or private clouds decreased slightly in 2018.
Containerization: The Rapid Growth of Kubernetes Adoption
As container usage increases, Docker continues to show strong growth; the adoption rate of the open-source platform increased from 49% in 2018 to 57%. Kubernetes, the container orchestration tool from Docker, saw even faster growth, rising from 27% to 48%.
Many users are also opting for container-as-a-service products from public cloud providers. AWS’s container services (ECS/EKS) maintained a 44% adoption rate in 2019 (the same as in 2018). Azure’s container service adoption reached 28%, up from 20% in 2018, and Google Kubernetes Engine saw slight growth to a 15% adoption rate.
It turns out that serverless is the fastest-growing cloud service for the second consecutive year, with a 50% increase in adoption compared to 2018 (from 24% to 36%). The fastest-growing area is data stream processing, which increased from 20% to 30%. Machine learning, container-as-a-service, and the Internet of Things (IoT) are the next fastest-growing areas.
Cost Management and Licensing Remain Top Concerns
In 2019, most respondents reported facing five key challenges, such as larger scale, complexity, and higher-level issues. Among these challenges, managing cloud computing and cloud governance were the most significant, both at 84%.
Clearly, cloud computing users tend to underestimate the wasted cloud spending. Respondents estimated that 27% of cloud spending in 2019 would be wasted, while RightScale’s survey indicated that the actual waste was 35%. Despite growing attention on cloud cost management, only a few companies have implemented automation strategies to address this, such as shutting down unused workloads or modifying instances.
Core cloud teams indicated that their top responsibility is shifting toward managing cloud costs (68% in 2019, up from 64% in 2018). Core IT teams are also focusing on governance, including identifying applications suitable for cloud computing (62%), setting policies (59%), and using automated cloud policies (57%).
Organizations are increasingly recognizing the challenges of managing software licenses running in the public cloud. Other major challenges include the cost impact of licensed software running in the cloud (52%), ensuring compliance with rules (42%), and the complexity of licensing rules in public clouds (41%).