The summer might be slowly coming to an end, but here’s something to invigorate you: another portion of fresh cloud technology news. 

This series brings you up to speed with the latest releases, acquisitions, research, and hidden gems in the world of cloud computing – the stuff actually worth reading. 

Here’s what happened in the cloud world this August.

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Story of the month: Multi cloud is here, there’s no denying it anymore

HashiCorp recently published its inaugural State of Cloud Strategy Survey, which showed that multi cloud is the new normal.

The company surveyed 3,205 tech practitioners and decision-makers from companies of different sizes and industries and hailing from various locations around the world. 

Here are the most interesting findings:

Multi cloud is real

Source: HashiCorp

76% of respondents are already working in multi cloud environments, using more than one public or private cloud. Multi cloud is no longer an inspirational idea - it’s an everyday reality. And since 86% of tech practitioners expect to be using multi cloud within the next two years, the adoption of multi cloud will only grow.

Who goes multi cloud?

To no surprise, multi cloud adoption is greatest among larger organizations - 90% of companies with more than 5k employees are already using multi cloud. Still, 60% of small businesses (counting <100 employees) already have multi cloud environments, and 81% of them expect to embrace this approach within the next two years.

What drives multi cloud adoption?

Why are all of these companies adopting the multi cloud approach? The top reason lies in digital transformation programs. This is interesting because we all thought it was all about cost optimization and avoiding vendor lock-in.

Here are the top driving forces behind multi cloud:

• 34% - digital transformation initiatives, 
• 30% - avoiding single cloud vendor lock-in, 
• 28% - cost reduction, 
• 25% - ability to scale. 

Digital transformation was especially strong among enterprises as 50% of them pointed to this factor. But it also caught the attention of the financial services industry, where 41% of respondents consider it a top driver.

Source: HashiCorp

What are the key inhibitors to multi cloud’s rise to fame?

Two things make moving to multi cloud hard: skill shortage and security. 

More than half (57%) of respondents consider skill shortage as the top challenge that hinders building multi cloud capabilities. Next, we see inconsistent workflows across cloud environments (33%) and team siloization (29%).

Another problem is security, the top-three inhibitors on many cloud journeys. Almost half (47%) of respondents said that security is the issue - be it governance, regulatory compliance and risk management, or data and privacy protection.

And a final gem: 46% of tech leaders don’t think it’s COVID-19 that’s driving them to the cloud

Many ascribe the spread of cloud technologies to the pandemic’s impact on the global economy, but this seems to be an incomplete picture. Almost half of the survey respondents (46%) said that COVID-19 didn’t affect their move to the cloud, and another 19% said it had a low impact (speeding the shift by some 6-12 months).

This shows that in most organizations, cloud efforts were well underway before the pandemic started and are bound to continue in the post-pandemic future. 

Interestingly, in response to the pandemic, many companies embraced modern, cloud native technologies like:

• Infrastructure as Code (49%), 
• container orchestration (41%), 
• network infrastructure automation (33%), 
• and said self-service infrastructure (32%).

At CAST AI, we believe that multi cloud is the future, leading to the democratization of cloud services and reduced vendor lock-in. That’s why our platform comes with a host of multi cloud features -  find out more about them here: How to spin a multi cloud application with CAST AI.

Source: HashiCorp 

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The Business of Cloud

Rumor has it Databricks - the cloud data company that raised $1 billion earlier this year - agreed to a new deal that includes its valuation at a smashing $38 billion. Morgan Stanley is to lead the investment round said to bring at least $1.5 billion to the company. These figures prove that the cloud market is hotter than ever and we’re bound to see more investments into cloud companies in the near future.

Source: Bloomberg

GE Appliances signed a multi-year partnership with Google Cloud to develop next-gen smart home technologies. The company will benefit from the cloud giant’s expertise in data, AI, machine learning, and smooth integration with other Google technologies like Android, Google Assistant, and Vision AI. Let’s keep a close eye on the IoT scene and see what comes out of this collaboration.

Source: Google Cloud 

61% of public cloud comes from AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, according to the analytics company Canalys. AWS now accounts for 31% of global cloud infrastructure spending, bringing in home revenue of some $59 billion per year (that’s more than HP or Lenovo!). At a 22% market share, Microsoft Azure is the second-largest cloud provider (and growing by more than half from 2020Q2!).

Source: Canalys 

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Food for thought

The cloud gets political, this time in the tug-of-war between the US and China. ​​The cloud is said to become China’s next objective - and things are certainly looking good. During the pandemic, Chinese cloud providers noted incredible growth. Huawei more than doubled its global IaaS market share. Modern societies increasingly depend on the cloud and all the digital services it connects - from email to AI applications. It’s high time US policymakers started seeing the cloud as a strategic investment.

Source: Politico 

The UK government now officially advises that companies move to the cloud to curb carbon emissions. Cloud migration was listed by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) as one of the steps businesses should take to fight climate change. This comes as part of the government’s border push to inspire companies to support its net-zero emissions campaign that assumes cutting carbon footprints by half by 2030.

If you’re interested in this topic, be sure to check out the session co-hosted by our Product Marketing Manager Annie Talvasto at the upcoming KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America: How Event Driven Autoscaling in Kubernetes Can Combat Climate Change - Annie Talvasto, CAST AI & Adi Polak, Microsoft (more info here).

Source: Computer Weekly 

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New in CAST AI

And here are some new product features hot off the press:  

• We released the first version of the cluster metrics endpoint that provides visibility into the CAST AI-captured metrics (explore the setup guide on Github). We will be expanding the list of exposed metrics, so stay tuned.
• Our team implemented the Node Root Volume Policy policy that allows the configuration of root volume size based on the CPU count. That way, nodes with a high CPU count can have a larger root disk allocated to them.
• We enhanced the Spot instance policy for EKS and Kops, so you can provision the least interrupted instances, the most cost-effective ones, or just go with the default balanced approach. 
• CAST AI agent v.0.20.0 was released – it now supports auto-discovery of GKE clusters, so there’s no need to enter any cluster details manually.
• Cluster headroom and Node constraints policies are now separated and can be used simultaneously.
• We made it easier for users to set correct node CPU and Memory constraints that adhere to the supported ratios.

P.S. Be the first one to optimize a GKE cluster with CAST AI. Connect your cluster, get a self-served savings report now and start saving. Not a GKE user? Share this link with someone who is.

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