The eighth RightScale State of the Cloud Survey shows public cloud adoption is on the up in 2019, with companies of all sizes increasing investments in public cloud while private cloud use is in decline.
Conducted on January 2019, the RightScale survey asks 786 IT professionals about the adoption of cloud infrastructure and related technologies. Of the respondents, 58% represent enterprises with over 1000 employees.
As mentioned earlier, public cloud is becoming increasingly popular with enterprises, with adoption clocking at 91%. Private cloud, on the other hand, is at 72%, and 69% of respondents use "at least" one public and one private cloud. Thus it should come to no surprise that the adoption of hybrid cloud strategies is on the rise, growing from 50% in 2018 to 58% in 2019, even if the number of organisations using multiple public clouds or multiple private clouds is declining "slightly." Overall, 84% of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy.
That said, the use of multiple clouds leads to cost concerns-- in fact, according to the survey the #1 priority in 2019 is cloud cost optimisation for cost savings. The challenge of managing cloud spend grows as cloud use increases, since while 64% of respondents cite optimising cloud spend as top initiative, the number is higher among intermediate and advanced cloud users, at 70% and 76% respectively.
In addition, RightScale points out cloud users underestimate the amount of wasted cloud spend. Respondents estimate 27% waste in 2019, but RightScale owner Flexera points out actual waste totals 35%, despite an increased focused on cloud cost management. As such, a "minority" of companies have implemented automated policies to address the issue, such as shutting down unused workloads or rightsizing instances. Furthermore, users fail to fully leverage various cloud provider discounting options.
Moving to other cloud-related priorities, other top initiatives according to RightScale include moving more workloads to cloud (58%), expanding the use of containers and adopting a cloud-first strategy (ied at 39%) and implementing automated governance policies (35%). Speaking of containers, the use of Docker containers is up from 49% in 2018 to 57% in 2019, with Kubernetes as the fastest growing Docker-based orchestration platform with 48% adoption (up from 27%).
When it comes to public clouds, Azure adoption is up from 45% to 52%, narrowing the gap with AWS. Azure adoption now totals 85% of AWS adoption, up from 70% in 2018. Google maintains a 3rd position with 19% adoption, while other growing public providers include VMware Cloud on AWS (12% adoption rate), Oracle (16%), IBM Cloud (18%) and Alibaba (4%).
Clouds need configuration, specifically through adequate tools-- and Ansible is the most popular configuration tool, with 41% adoption (up from 36% in 2018). Puppet and Chef follow at tied 37% adoption, and Terraform is in 4th place with 31% adoption.
