Cloudability State of the Cloud 2018 Report Reveals Cloud Technology Adoption Trends

By Richard Anderson

Cloudability has published its State of the Cloud 2018 Report. The cloud management platform provider has revealed real world trends in adoption of cloud technology, the amount organizations are investing in the cloud, where the money is being spent, and how it is being used.

For the report, Cloudability analyzed the data from more than 1,500 companies who spent a combined $2.5 billion on cloud services. Cloudability reports that its analysis includes more than 75 billion data points and covers more than 3 billion CPU hours and over 200 million compute resources. The data for the study were collected throughout 2017.

Cloudability estimates that only 10% of workloads have been moved to the cloud and predicts that cloud migration will hold steady over the coming year. Current distributions among the various cloud providers is unlikely to see major change in 2018.

Businesses are purchasing a wide variety of cloud resources and services, although the vast majority of spending – 85% – goes on just four cloud resources. Top of the list is the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which has a market share of 58.7%. Amazon’s other cloud services such as Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) has a 9.9% market share, just ahead of the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) with 9.3%, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) with 6.3%.

Adoption of the current generation of Amazon EC2 families has been growing steadily throughout 2017. At the start of the year, 42% of companies were using legacy compute instances compared to 58% on the new generation instances. By the end of the year, the figures were 30% on legacy compute instances and 70% on the current generation instances. Cloudability also identified a 12-month cycle in the cloud, rather than the traditional three-year data center hardware renewal cycle.

“With State of Cloud 2018, we wanted to liberate our massive data set, share the insights we are seeing across billions of dollars of cloud spend and help the entire ecosystem – enterprises, devops teams, cloud vendors and industry watchers – to get a better understand of cloud adoption and usage trends,” said Erik Onnen, CTO, Cloudability.

Other key findings from the report include:

  • 43% of companies have most of their compute workloads on standard instances such as T1, T2, M3, M4 and M5. 24% of companies are using high CPU instances such as C3, C4 and C5, 23% provision memory dense instances, 10% are on high IO instances, and only 1% are using GPU dense instances.
  • Serverless computing is enjoying rapid growth, with 100% growth in Q1, 138% growth in Q2, 321% growth in Q3 and 667% growth in Q4.
  • Artificial intelligence and machine learning related to GPU instances is growing steadily with 100% growth in Q1, 252% growth in Q2, 252% growth in Q3, and 357% growth in Q4.
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Richard Anderson

Richard Anderson is the Editor-in-Chief of NetSec.news