When it comes to public cloud services market share, Microsoft Azure is closing the gap vs. Amazon Web Services (AWS), while Google Cloud Platform's (CSP) stake in the market essentially remains flat, according to Rightscale's State of the Cloud report.
The report, released in February 2019, reveals several interesting cloud market updates. Indeed, 94 percent of respondents now leverage cloud technologies. Public cloud adoption is at 91 percent and private cloud adoption is at 72 percent, according to Rightscale.
Azure vs. AWS vs. Google Cloud: Adoption Statistics
Notably, Microsoft Azure apparently is gaining ground on the leading Amazon Web Services, especially among enterprises.
- Overall Azure adoption grew from 45 to 52 percent, according to the researchers.
- Azure’s adoption rate is now 85 percent that of AWS’, up from 70 percent last year.
- Google Cloud has maintained its third-place position, increasing slightly from 18 to 19 percent adoption.
Interestingly, in its second year of availability, VMware Cloud on AWS has taken up the fourth place position, increasing to 12 percent adoption in 2018 vs 8 percent in 2017.
Other key statistics amongst public cloud providers include:
- Oracle grew from 10 percent to 16 percent (a 60 percent growth rate)
- IBM Cloud grew from 15 percent to 18 percent (a 20 percent growth rate)
- Alibaba grew from 2 percent to 4 percent (a 100 growth rate)
China-based Aibaba Cloud tends to enjoy strong adoption in Asia. The company is gaining its footing in Europe, and supports U.S.-based companies around the world -- though the cloud provider doesn't have much uptake directly on U.S. soil.
The Path To PaaS
Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers are likely feeling good as well, according to the survey. Use of PaaS services from public cloud providers appears to be accelerating.
The study takes the broad definition of PaaS, looking at a variety of different providers. For example, the study shows that serverless providers saw the most growth for the second year in a row, with a 50 percent increase from 2018.
Stream processing also saw a major adoption rate increase, jumping from 20 to 30 percent. Machine learning, container-as-a-service, and IoT are the next fastest growing.
There were some key points among enterprises:
- Relational DBaaS grew 60%
- Data warehouse jumped 50%
- Push notifications grew 50%
- Container-as-a-service took fourth place at 48%
Machine learning has the highest interest for future use, with 48% of all respondents experimenting with or planning to use it.
Cloud Optimization Proves a Priority
The study shows that what companies are most concerned with heading into 2019 is cloud cost optimization.
This has been true for the last three years in a row. But while 64 percent of all respondents said that optimizing cloud spends was their top initiative, the number was even higher among intermediate and advanced cloud users at 70 percent and 76 percent, respectively.
Other Data Points and Findings
Additional findings include:
1. Enterprise cloud spend is significant and growing quickly. Enterprises plan to spend 24 percent more on public cloud in 2019 than in 2018. Meanwhile, eight percent of enterprises spend more than $12 million a year on public cloud, while 50 percent spend more than $1.2 million annually.
2. Cloud users are not doing all they can to optimize costs. Despite most respondents listing this issue as a priority, cloud users underestimate the amount of wasted cloud spend, according to Rightscale. Respondents estimate 27 percent waste in 2019, while Flexera has measured actual waste at 35 percent.
3. Rightscale says enterprises create cloud “centers of excellence” to focus on cloud governance. The majority (66 percent) of enterprises already have a central cloud team or center of excellence with another 21 percent planning one.
4. Rightscale says managing software licenses in the public cloud is top of mind. Understanding the cost implications of licensed software running in the cloud is also a key challenge at 52 percent. Other challenges include understanding the complexity of license rules in public cloud (42 percent), and ensuring that they are following the rules (41 percent).
5. Hybrid cloud strategies continue to grow, according to Rightscale. Enterprises that combine public and private clouds grew to 58 percent in 2019 from 51 percent in 2018.
6. Rightscale says Organizations leverage almost five clouds, on average: Respondents are already running applications in a combination of 3.4 public and private clouds and experimenting with 1.5 more for a total of 4.9 clouds, according to the surveyor. Among those using any public cloud, respondents are currently using 2.0 public clouds and experimenting with 1.8 more. Among those using any private cloud, respondents are currently using 2.7 private clouds and experimenting with 2.0 more.
7. Companies run a majority of workloads in cloud, according to Rightscale. Respondents overall run 38 percent of workloads in public cloud and 41 percent in private cloud.
8. Rightscale says container use is up and Kubernetes use is skyrocketing. The use of Docker containers continues to grow with adoption increasing to 57 percent from 49 percent in 2018. Kubernetes, a container orchestration tool that leverages Docker, achieves the fastest growth, increasing at 48 percent adoption. Enterprise adoption is even higher, with 66 percent using Docker and 60 percent leveraging Kubernetes. The AWS container service was flat from 2018, while Azure Container Service adoption reached 28 percent (up from 20% in 2018) and Google Container Engine grew slightly to reach adoption of 15 percent.
