In January 2016, RightScale surveyed 1,060 technical professionals across a broad cross-section of organisations about their adoption of cloud computing.
The survey questioned technical professionals across a broad sample of organisations about their adoption of cloud infrastructure.
The 1,060 respondents range from technical executives to managers and practitioners and represent organisations of varying sizes across many industries. Respondents represent companies across the cloud spectrum, including both users (17 percent) and non-users (83 percent) of RightScale solutions.
A Cloud Maturity Model was developed to segment and analyse organisations based on their levels of cloud adoption: Cloud Watchers, Cloud Beginners, Cloud Explorers and Cloud Focused. Small-medium businesses made up 59% of respondents.
The survey on which the RightScale 2016 State of the Cloud Report is based includes organisations across all the stages of cloud maturity.
Difference between Public, Private and Hybrid Cloud
Public Cloud
A public cloud is one based on the standard cloud computing model, in which a service provider makes resources available to the general public over the Internet.
Public clouds provide services to multiple clients using the same shared infrastructure.
Public clouds are used extensively in offerings for private individuals who are less likely to need the level of infrastructure and security offered by private clouds.
The main benefits of using a public cloud service are:
- Ultimate scalability
- Cost effective
- Utility style costing
- Reliability
- Flexibility
- Location independence
Examples of public clouds include AWS, Azure IaaS, Azure PaaS, Google App Engine, Digital Ocean and IBM SoftLayer.
Private Cloud
Private cloud is a type of cloud computing that delivers similar advantages to public cloud but through a proprietary architecture to a single organisation. The cloud is only accessible by a single organisation providing that organisation with greater control and privacy.
Private cloud is best for businesses with dynamic or unpredictable computing needs that require direct control over their environments.
The main benefits of using a private cloud service are:
- Scalability
- Multi-tenancy
- Higher security and privacy
- Cloud bursting
- Cost and energy efficiency
- Chargeback tools track computing usage
- Improved reliability
Examples of private clouds include VMware vSphere/vCenter, OpenStack, Bare-Metal Cloud, CloudStack and Microsoft Azure Pack.
Hybrid Cloud
Hybrid cloud is a cloud computing environment which uses a mix of on-premises, private cloud and third-party, public cloud services with orchestration between the two platforms.
Hybrid cloud models can be implemented in a number of ways:
- Separate cloud providers team up to provide both private and public services as an integrated service
- Individual cloud providers offer a complete hybrid package
- Organisations who manage their private clouds themselves sign up to a public cloud service which they then integrate into their infrastructure
The main benefits of using a hybrid cloud service are:
- Scalability
- Cost efficiencies
- Security
- Flexibility
Top 5 Public Clouds used by Small-medium business
2015 was a big year for major public cloud providers and private cloud technologies. Cloud providers continued to add services; costs continued to drop, and overall adoption of cloud increased.
1. AWS
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a comprehensive, evolving cloud computing platform provided by Amazon.com.
The growing AWS collection offers over three dozen diverse services allowing users to upload and access files, run application programs, developers to integrate human intelligence into RPCs. All AWS offerings are billed according to usage.
2. Azure IaaS
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) refers to online services that abstract the user from the details of infrastructure like physical computing resources, location, data partitioning, scaling, security, backup, etc.
Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure created by Microsoft for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed data centres.
3. Azure PaaS
Platform as a service (PaaS) is a category of cloud computing services that provides a platform allowing customers to develop, run, and manage applications without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure typically associated with developing and launching an app.
PaaS is designed to support the complete web application lifecycle: building, testing, deploying, managing, and updating.
4. Google App Engine
Google App Engine is a PaaS cloud computing platform for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centres. Applications are sandboxed and run across multiple servers.
Google App Engine is free up to a certain level of consumed resources. Fees are charged for additional storage, bandwidth, or instance hours required by the application.
5. DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean is a cloud infrastructure provider focused on simplifying web infrastructure for software developers. DigitalOcean users can have their personal cloud server spun up and active in 55 seconds.
Each box comes with full root access, a choice of operating systems, and the ability to customise the setup.
Survey Insights
Respondents were asked which clouds they were using and whether they were running applications in the cloud, experimenting with the cloud, planning to use the cloud, or had no plans to use the cloud.
The results indicate whether a respondent is using any cloud but do not specify the number of applications that are running in each cloud.
As expected, AWS continues to lead in public cloud adoption, with over half of respondents currently running applications in this cloud. The percentage of respondents running applications in AWS was flat this year, although, per reports from Amazon, the number of workloads in AWS is increasing. Azure IaaS and PaaS both showed increased adoption, narrowing the gap with AWS.
DigitalOcean and Oracle Cloud were added to the survey for the first time this year. One can also gauge interest and potential for future adoption by measuring respondents that are experimenting or planning to use particular clouds.
This year Azure IaaS and PaaS stand out with a higher percentage of respondents experimenting or planning to use those clouds. This could indicate the potential for Azure to increase adoption in future years as these experiments and plans come to fruition.
This year, IaaS and PaaS for Google and Azure were looked at separately as well as together.
Because many users leverage both IaaS and PaaS offerings from these vendors, the combined adoption is less than the sum of the adoption numbers for each individual service. Whereas 13 percent are using Azure IaaS and 10 percent are using Azure PaaS, 15 percent are using either or both Azure offerings.
7 percent are using Google App Engine and 6 percent are using Google IaaS, while 11 percent are using either or both of Google IaaS/PaaS.
Comparing this year’s data with last, we see that AWS saw a small dip (61 to 58 percent) year-over-year in adoption by Small-medium business. There were significant increases in adoption of Azure IaaS (9 to 13 percent) and PaaS (6 to 10 percent). Small increases in VMware vCloud Air and IBM SoftLayer (+2 percent).
Among Small-medium business, AWS is in first (58 percent), followed by Azure IaaS (13 percent) and Azure PaaS (10 percent). Interest levels for future adoption are highest in Azure IaaS (32 percent) and Azure PaaS (28 percent).
Public cloud adoption patterns remain different between larger enterprises and smaller organisations. AWS remains in first place across both segments, followed by Azure IaaS and Azure PaaS. In the Small-medium business segment, Google App Engine is #4 followed by DigitalOcean at #5.
Top 5 Private Clouds used by Small-medium business
The 2016 State of the Cloud Survey reveals that adoption of private cloud is growing across all providers.
1.VMware vSphere/vCenter
VMware Inc. is a software company that develops many suites of software products specially for providing various virtualization solutions.
vSphere is a software suite that is classified as a data centre product. vSphere is similar to Microsoft Office Suite, which has many types of software like MS Office, MS Excel, MS Access and so on. vCenter server is similar to vSphere client but it’s a server with more power.
vCenter server is installed on a Windows Server or Linux Server. VMware vCenter server is a centralised management application that lets you manage virtual machines and ESXi hosts centrally.
2. OpenStack
OpenStack is a free and open-source software platform for cloud computing, mostly deployed as an IaaS. OpenStack lets users deploy virtual machines and other instances that handle different tasks for managing a cloud environment on the fly.
The software platform consists of interrelated components that control diverse, multi-vendor hardware pools of processing, storage, and networking resources throughout a data centre.
3. Bare-Metal Cloud
Bare-metal cloud is a public cloud service in which the customer rents hardware resources from a remote service provider.
One of the major benefits of the bare-metal cloud is the flexibility it provides. Businesses can customise a bare-metal cloud based to meet their unique requirements and troubleshoot applications without having to worry about neighbouring virtual machines (VMs).
The bare-metal cloud works well for big data applications or high-transaction workloads that do not tolerate latency.
4. CloudStack
CloudStack is an open source cloud computing software for creating, managing, and deploying infrastructure cloud services.
It allows users to deploy and manage large networks of virtual machines, as a highly available, highly scalable IaaS cloud computing platform that includes the entire “stack” of features most organisations want with an IaaS cloud: compute orchestration, Network-as-a-Service, user and account management, a full and open native API, resource accounting, and a first-class User Interface (UI).
5. VMware vCloud Suite
VMware vCloud Suite is an integrated collection of VMware software products for building a private cloud infrastructure.
VMware vCloud Suite features components for cloud services provisioning, cloud services monitoring and cloud services. vCloud Suite 5.5 is composed of:
- vSphere
- vCenter Site Recovery Management
- vCloud Networking and Security
- vCloud Automation Center
- vCenter Operations Management Suite
- vCloud Director
Survey Insights
In comparison to last year, there were noticeable increases in adoption rates of every private cloud technology. Year-over-year, several vendors made strong gains. VMware vSphere/vCenter was up from 23 to 32 percent, OpenStack rose from 10 to 17 percent, CloudStack more than doubled (6 to 13 percent), and VMware vCloud Suite doubled (6 to 12 percent).
Private cloud adoption by smaller organisations is lower overall than enterprises. While VMware vSphere/vCenter (32 percent) is still the top option, OpenStack took second place in this group with 17 percent already running applications. Bare-metal cloud, in its first year on the survey, was the third option for Small-medium businesses.
Once again, OpenStack has gained mindshare with 26 percent of Small-medium businesses experimenting or planning to use it, and Microsoft Azure Pack also garners strong interest with 25 percent of enterprises experimenting or planning to use.
Growth of Hybrid
In the twelve months since the last State of the Cloud Survey, we’ve seen strong growth in hybrid cloud adoption as public cloud users added private cloud resource pools. 77 percent of respondents are now adopting private cloud up from 63 percent last year. As a result, use of hybrid cloud environments has grown to 71 percent. In total, 95 percent of respondents are now using cloud up from 93 percent in 2015.
The 2016 State of the Cloud Survey shows that cloud adoption is growing and hybrid cloud adoption has now hit its stride. The strong growth in the use of private cloud, combined with the ubiquity of public cloud means that a super-majority of organisations are now operating in a hybrid environment. Cloud benefits continued to grow, with the strongest gains in speed-to-infrastructure and speed-to-market.
Cloud Beginners saw the greatest gains this past year as cloud best practices became more established and cloud providers improved their offerings. With increasing maturity of both cloud users and cloud providers, we are seeing a reduction in concerns about cloud security, but IT organisations are challenged by a shortage of trained resources that they will need to fuel this growth.
As adoption grows, cloud bills and cost concerns are also growing, but most organisations are doing little to implement cost management and optimisation strategies. This represents an opportunity to reduce costs and further improve cloud ROI.
Summary
In the coming year, enterprises and newer cloud users are looking to move additional workloads to the cloud, while more experienced cloud users plan to optimise existing cloud usage to reduce costs.
There are strong leaders in both the public and private cloud sectors which are sure to boost cloud adoption by Small-medium businesses and nurture the growth of hybrid models.
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