Investigating the Next Generation of Infrastructure-as-a-Service
Are organizations reconsidering the idea of private and hybrid clouds?
A few weeks ago, we noted that private clouds from Azure, AWS and Google Cloud were gaining users according to survey for Flexera’s State of the Cloud Report. The long-running study’s 2020 version saw a big jump in enterprises using at least one private and one public cloud — what the study defined as a hybrid cloud. That figure was relatively consistent until this year, when the figure jumped to 87%. Some of the rise may be due to the change in sampling methodology, yet there is a clear rise over the last year for Microsoft Azure Stack (28% to 40%) and AWS Outpost (14% to 26%). Red Hat OpenShift (22%) and Google Anthos (14%) were added to the survey just this year. Despite reports of its imminent demise, OpenStack adoption only dropped a little bit (36% to 33%). The biggest declines have been in adoption of private clouds on top of bare metal and using VMware vSphere.
Is this an early sign that private and hybrid clouds are seeing renewed vigor by addressing the needs of enterprises to run their own infrastructure? And if so, do enterprises care if that infrastructure’s management relies on software created by one of the large public cloud providers? We don’t know the answers, but this is at the core of The New Stack investigation into the next generation of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
For the next few months, we will be talking to chief technology officers and cloud architects at organizations currently operating a private or hybrid cloud, and our first questions will be about the workloads that will be driving infrastructure requirements in the next few years. Then, several of these industry veterans will help assess whether the architecture of current solutions can meet these requirements. We expect the discussions to delve into requirements around scalability, edge nodes, and how a standardized architecture can stimulate the adoption of Infrastructure-as-Code.
The research initiative is still in its early stages. If you are interested in sharing your expertise, begin the conversation by reaching out to Lawrence Hecht.
Amazon Web Services, Red Hat and VMware are sponsors of The New Stack.
Feature image via Pixabay.
