DEVOPSdigest

Ten years ago, we were operating in a very different place. Digital transformation was an early buzzword and many companies were either starting (or not started) their cloud journey. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was starting off and Kubernetes was not even invented yet.

Fast forward to today and things look very different. Every enterprise is undergoing digital transformation, CIOs are driving to Cloud-first or cloud native IT and IT is being measured on innovation. But there is still a knowledge gap in most IT organizations.

According to research that analyzed the technology adoption of companies who run on all the major cloud platforms and hybrid infrastructures, data shows cloud adoption has steadily increased as more enterprise companies are turning toward a multi-cloud approach for increased scalability, flexibility and maintaining the best-in-breed solutions for independent workloads. While Amazon Web Services remains the leader in public cloud, open source adoption, including the rise of Kubernetes and serverless, is driving growth across service providers.

This current cloud era driven and disrupted by multi-cloud and open source technologies has created unique challenges for companies who are under pressure to build, run and secure their modern applications and cloud infrastructures effectively and securely.

Multi-Cloud Driving Kubernetes Adoption

A majority of enterprises now view Kubernetes as the preferred method for deploying and managing applications across on-prem and cloud environments. According to Sumo Logic's Continuous Intelligence Report, 80% of enterprises currently running across all three major cloud providers - AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure — use managed or native Kubernetes solutions as a preferred orchestration tool.

The Continuous Intelligence Report also shows enterprises are more likely to adopt Kubernetes in the Google Cloud Platform however, one-in-five AWS users are also utilizing Kubernetes. Kubernetes is an open source solution and the industry can continue to expect widespread adoption across all three major cloud providers with customers focusing decision making based on interoperability across multi-cloud workloads.

Serverless Adoption has Reached a Tipping Point

Serverless architectures also continue to grow at a rapid pace as a cost-effective option to accelerate and automate cloud and DevOps deployments.

AWS Lambda, a serverless architecture that lets IT teams run code without requiring them to provision or manage server infrastructure, has helped the cloud provider maintain dominance in the cloud. Based on the findings within the report, one-in-three enterprises use AWS Lambda in production — an annual growth from 29% (2018) to 36% (2019). AWS Lambda is also used heavily in non- production use cases and has become one of the top 10 AWS services by adoption.

Enterprises Demand Autonomy Among Cloud Services

To support evolving multi-cloud strategies, businesses are seeking solutions that do not inhibit them to a single cloud provider. For example, the report found adoption of AWS services demonstrates fewer than 10% of its 150 cloud services are broadly adopted by the majority of its customers. Data shows AWS' management, tooling, and advanced security services are adopted at a significantly lower rate as customers seek offerings that can easily port or manage multi-cloud environments.

A New Continuous Approach Is Needed

The increased adoption of services to enable and secure a multi-cloud strategy has created an "Intelligence Economy" from the data coming from these digital operating models that is putting added pressure on companies to analyze and act upon data this data to drive great customer experiences. However, with more data comes more complexity and noise, which current legacy analytics solutions can't handle. If companies want to continue delivering high-performance, highly scalable and always-on digital services their customers demand, they need to employ a continuous intelligence strategy that consolidates all of their data into a single pane of glass to effectively manage operations and ensure application security and compliance.

In this day and age of a rapidly evolving technology landscape coupled with ever-increasing customer expectations, it has become clear that companies need to have real-time insights that are actionable or risk being vulnerable to disruption and irrelevance.