Cloud Comfort Level is Growing, Survey Finds
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The majority of enterprise applications are developed and deployed in the cloud, concludes a semi-annual survey on cloud adoption.
Cloud Foundry Foundation reported that more than 50 percent of companies it surveyed are developing at least 60 percent of their applications on cloud platform. That total is up sharply—13 percent—from the group’s last survey released in March. The poll also found a 17 percent jump in public cloud usage while private cloud uptake rose 6 percent during the same period.
Those totals illustrate how companies are embracing multi-cloud deployments to avoid vendor lock-in and to ensure availability and application security.
Despite what is described as “a pronounced push from companies to re-architect and move legacy applications to the cloud,” the survey also concludes that only one-quarter of cloud adopters are going all-in with cloud-native application development. About half said they are undertaking “some” cloud-native development, but about half said they are in the midst of some “lift-and-shift” of legacy applications to the cloud.
“Once companies choose a cloud provider or providers, they immediately start searching for the right integrations that enable their platforms to interoperate with existing tooling and legacy applications as well as take advantage of new cloud native application architectures,” states the survey, which was released by the Cloud Foundry Foundation on Dec. 15.
The group also noted a fundamental shift in business priorities over the last 18 months, with cloud-driven agile development and continuous deployment overtaking cost reductions and increased efficiency as the top priority. In 2015, IT executives were equally divided between the two goals. By the end of 2017, 57 percent of respondents cited agile development as their top priority.
“This leap to the cloud has been driven by increased comfort and subsequent adoption of more sophisticated technologies,” the survey concludes. “The increased comfort level with technologies and tools at the platform and application development layer of the stack is reflected in the data.”
The embrace is cloud platforms is also underscored by the rapid adoption of application container and serverless technologies. For example, the number of companies deploying more than 100 containers jumped 19 points in two years to 47 percent of those polled.
The survey revealed that serverless technology is being adopted at an even faster rate. “While serverless is still considered niche, the data forewarns of serverless making the leap from niche use cases to much broader adoption in the near future—especially as companies become more comfortable with the cloud and seek to abstract more tasks away from their development and DevOps teams,” the Cloud Foundry Foundation said.
