More IT spending is set to shift to the cloud in the near future, Gartner reports-- specifically 28% of spending within "key enterprise IT markets" by 2022, up from 19% in 2018.

The growth of spending on cloud-based offerings will be faster than growth in traditional, non-cloud offerings, even if said traditional offerings constitute 72% of enterprise IT revenues in 2022. Either way, the shift to the cloud affects over $1.3 trillion in spending by 2022, marking a long-term opportunity for providers able to capture such growth.

“The shift of enterprise IT spending to new, cloud-based alternatives is relentless, although it’s occurring over the course of many years due to the nature of traditional enterprise IT,” the analyst says. “Cloud shift highlights the appeal of greater flexibility and agility, which is perceived as a benefit of on-demand capacity and pay-as-you-go pricing in cloud.”

Google and Cisco release the result of a collaboration in the cloud-- the Cisco Hybrid Cloud Platform for Google Cloud, a means for customers to develop, deploy, manage and secure applications across both on-premises and the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

The fully integrated solution allows developers leverage enterprise-grade Google Cloud capabilities, including managed Kubernetes, GCP Service Catalog, and Cisco networking and security. Authentication and service mesh monitoring comes via Istio, the open-source microservices management technology providing policy-based controls to discover, connect, secure and manage services in a microservices environment.

Chinese cloud provider Alibaba quietly reveals a London region through a simple website update revealing the fact-- one declaring "London is Calling," even if it an actual launch date, at least so far, is lacking.

The London region comes 2 years after Alibaba entered the European market with a Frankfurt datacentre (specifically a co-location with Vodafone). The company has a total of 18 cloud regions around the world, with 14 in its home China and Asia/Pacific, 2 in the US and 2 in Europe.

The OpenStack Foundation announces the 18th release of its open source cloud infrastructure software-- Rocky, promising enhancements on the bare metal provisioning front, together with improved automation and usability on a variety of architectures.

On the upgrade front, OpenStack highlights refinements to the Ironic bare metal provisioning service. Ironic promises to bring more sophisticated management and automation capabilities to bare metal infrastructure, with user-managed BIOS settings (allowing users to gain performance, configure power management options, or enable technologies like SR-IOV or DPDK) and the addition of conductor groups, a means to isolate nodes based on physical location, reducing network hops for increased security and performance.