Miscellaneous
We discuss RightScale’s State of the Cloud report analyzing trends in the cloud. RightScale helps customers adopt cloud by helping them with a cloud management and optimization. This is the sixth year of the report so we can start to see trends over time now and there were a few interesting takeaways this year. In the report, RightScale asks two big questions for enterprises. First is about cloud strategy and what their intention is on cloud – to use private, public, or combinations of those. Second, they are asked about what they use today for private or public clouds. From a strategy point of view, people are still focused on multi-cloud with a special focus on hybrid cloud. In strategy, there was a shift away from private-only strategies. Fewer people were saying they plan to use only private cloud or multiple private clouds as their strategies. On adoption, there was a slight drop in people who are already using private cloud from 77% last year down to 72% this year. This may indicate companies who had tried to build their own private cloud with Openstack, and are now backing off from that strategy. The survey found that the average company leverages about four different cloud vendors. This a result of a combination of acquisitions of companies that use different cloud providers and a strategy to leverage different cloud providers. Rightscale asked people for a list of public and private clouds they are running applications on (focused on IaaS and PaaS, not SaaS) and whether they’re experimenting with particular public and private clouds. They found that among people that are using at least one public cloud, they’re running applications in 1.8 public clouds. They are typically experimenting with another 1.8 clouds. Even if they are not using one of the big cloud vendors, they are often at least experimenting with it. The ones that are adopting private cloud are reporting about 2.3 different private clouds. For top challenges this year there was a three-way tie between security, spend and skills (access to skilled resources). Last year skills was highest and it has dropped a bit this year. The people in IT who are concerned about security has been declining each year. Among enterprises, in 2017 over 35% rated cloud security as a significant challenge, and six years ago that number was about 10% higher. We have now reached a tipping point where people realize that when done right, cloud can be as secure if not more secure than a traditional data center. As people adopt public cloud, the cost has been increasing and companies are starting to realize they are inefficient with their spend. On average companies believe they are wasting 30% of their cloud spend. RightScale has found that 30-45% or more is typically what companies are wasting on their cloud spend. The survey found that the more mature a cloud instance is, the more important spend becomes. This year Docker has moved into first place in the list of tools RightScale researches, and while all tools had an increase in usage, Chef and Puppet had a decrease in usage. The survey specifically focuses on configuration management tools and container tools. Docker usage moved from 13% in 2015 to 27% in 2016 to 35% this year, while Chef and Puppet each dropped about 4% this year. The other big increase seen this year was in Kubernetes, which doubled from 7% last year to 14% this year and seems to be in the lead for scheduling and orchestration tools. There is an early trend RightScale noticed that people are starting to use Docker to take advantage of the temporary instances from the cloud providers such as AWS Spot or Google Preemptibles. For people looking to use those, which can mean 70-90% savings on demand, they need the ability to be very portable when they lose their temporary instances, so using Docker along with a container as a service can be helpful in saving those costs. We look at predictions for next year’s State of the Cloud report. Private cloud will likely continue to be under pressure, though we may see a slight uptick with VMware on AWS. It is likely that Docker will continue to grow and that the cost of the cloud will continue to be an ongoing challenge for enterprises.