Average Cloud User Leverages Six Different Clouds: Report

By The WHIR

Maturing cloud practices are leading the average cloud user to leverage six different clouds, between running applications and experimenting on public and private clouds, RightScale said in its latest report. The RightScale 2016 State of the Cloud Report shows that enterprise workloads continue to be moved into the cloud, particularly private clouds, driving a sustained increase in hybrid adoption.

The report is assembled from the answers of over 1,000 technical professionals surveyed about cloud adoption. While it confirms the well-established dominance of hybrid approaches to enterprise cloud use, it also indicates some shifts from a year ago significant to service providers.

Private cloud adoption grew from 63 percent to 77 percent of organizations, driving a 13 percent year-over-year increase in hybrid adoption to 71 percent. Seventeen percent of organizations have 1,000 or more VMs in public cloud, up four percent from a year ago. At the same time 31 percent now run thousand-VM private clouds, up 9 percent on the year. The number of clouds used by each user is split roughly evenly between private and public, and between running applications and experimenting.

Usage increases are paralleled by an increased acknowledgement of the role of central IT in setting policies, from 31 up to 44 percent, and selecting clouds, which went up 34 to 42 percent for public, and 35 to 44 percent for private. This lead to the number of companies with established approval policies for cloud increasing from 30 to 38 percent.

Another change is the top challenge for cloud computing, as a lack of resources and expertise passed security (32 to 29 percent) as the most cited top cloud challenge. The number of users mentioning cloud cost management as a challenge continues to increase.

Overall adoption of DevOps rose from 66 to 74 percent, and more than four out of five enterprises, with Docker adoption doubling to 27 percent, and 35 percent planning to use the leading DevOps container. Chef and Puppet are still the most popular DevOps tools in use right now, however, at 32 percent each, and Ansible use also doubled, to 20 percent. For every other DevOps tool RightScale asked about, the number of respondents planning to make use of it is much higher than the number who currently do so, suggesting big growth on the horizon for Salt, Kubernetes, Docker Swarm,Mezosphere, Docker Tutum, Rocket, and Rancher.

AWS continues to lead public cloud adoption, with 57 percent of respondents using it overall, while the number of enterprises on AWS grew and the number of small business declined. Azure IaaS increased 5 percent to 17 percent, and Azure PaaS use increased from 9 to 13 percent. All providers saw increased private cloud adoption, lead by VMware vSphere, which grew to 44 percent. OpenStack and VMware vCloud Suite are used by 19 percent of organizations, with OpenStack holding the edge for those with fewer than a thousand employees. The report also includes bare metal for the first time, which is used by 15 percent of respondents.

This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/average-cloud-user-leverages-six-different-clouds-report