Cloud data centre traffic will represent 95% of total data centre traffic by 2021, while 94% of workloads and compute instances will be processed by cloud data centres in the same year.

This is the key finding from the latest Cisco Global Cloud Index report, which again offers mind-boggling forecasts and statistics around future computing power. This time around, the report predicts that global cloud data centre traffic will hit 19.5 zettabytes (ZB) per year by 2021, up from 6 ZB per year in 2016. When it came to cloud data centre traffic as a proportion of overall data centre traffic, however, there isn’t as huge a change; as of 2016, Cisco argues, 88% of total data centre traffic was cloud-based.

Yet a predominant feature of this year’s report is around multi-cloud growth. To realise the increasing cloud infrastructure growth, more and more hyperscale data centres will appear. By 2021, Cisco argues, hyperscale data centres will support more than half (53%) of data centre servers – up from 27% in 2016, and almost two thirds (65%) of all data stored in data centres, up from 51% two years ago.

The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) will naturally also contribute to the greater traffic. Cisco expects IoT connections to reach 13.7 billion by 2021, more than double 2016’s total of 5.8m.

Conway Kosi, SVP and head of managed infrastructure services at Fujitsu EMEA, says the report highlights how organisations need to consider pursuing a cloud-native strategy. “Close collaboration between the C-suite and the IT team will enable businesses to design a balance that works for them in the long term,” said Kosi. “By unlocking the power in existing systems while facilitating innovation with new technologies, hybrid IT can enable even older companies to draw on the power of what they have today – while moving quickly enough for tomorrow.”

Software as a service (SaaS) will contribute three quarters of total cloud workloads and compute instances by 2021, with 16% being infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and 9% platform as a service (PaaS), showing a market unlikely to change from its current position.

If you're a CTO or CIO that has escalated your organization's move to the cloud, then clearly you're not alone. Worldwide spending on public cloud services and infrastructure is forecast to reach $160 billion in 2018 — that's an increase of 23.2 percent over 2017, according to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC).

Although annual spending growth is expected to slow somewhat over the 2016-2021 forecast period, the market is forecast to achieve a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.9 percent with public cloud services spending totaling $277 billion in 2021.

Public cloud services market development

The industries that are forecast to spend the most on public cloud services in 2018 are discrete manufacturing ($19.7 billion), professional services ($18.1 billion), and banking ($16.7 billion). The process manufacturing and retail industries are also expected to spend more than $10 billion each on public cloud services in 2018.

These five industries will remain at the top in 2021 due to their continued investment in public cloud solutions. The industries that will see the fastest spending growth over the five-year forecast period are professional services (24.4 percent CAGR), telecommunications (23.3 percent CAGR), and banking (23 percent CAGR).

Software as a service (SaaS) will be the largest cloud computing category, capturing nearly two thirds of all public cloud spending in 2018. SaaS spending, which is comprised of applications and system infrastructure software (SIS), will be dominated by applications purchases, which will make up more than half of all public cloud services spending through 2019.

Enterprise resource management (ERM) applications and customer relationship management (CRM) applications will see the most spending in 2018, followed by collaborative applications and content applications.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) will be the second largest category of public cloud spending in 2018, followed by Platform as a service (PaaS). IaaS spending will be fairly balanced throughout the forecast with server spending trending slightly ahead of storage spending.

PaaS spending will be led by data management software, which will see the fastest spending growth (38.1 percent CAGR) over the forecast period. Application platforms, integration and orchestration middleware, and data access, analysis and delivery applications will also see healthy spending levels in 2018 and beyond.

The United States will be the largest country market for public cloud services in 2018 with its $97 billion accounting for more than 60 percent of worldwide spending. The United Kingdom and Germany will lead public cloud spending in Western Europe at $7.9 billion and $7.4 billion respectively, while Japan and China will round out the top 5 countries in 2018 with spending of $5.8 billion and $5.4 billion, respectively.

China will experience the fastest growth in public cloud services spending over the five-year forecast period (43.2 percent CAGR), enabling it to leap ahead of the UK, Germany, and Japan into the number 2 position in 2021. Argentina (39.4 percent CAGR), India (38.9 percent CAGR), and Brazil (37.1 percent CAGR) will also experience particularly strong spending growth.

Outlook for cloud adoption by industry

The U.S. industries that will spend the most on public cloud services in 2018 are discrete manufacturing, professional services, and banking. Together, these three industries will account for roughly one third of all U.S. public cloud services spending this year.

In the UK, the top three industries (banking, retail, and discrete manufacturing) will provide more than 40 percent of all public cloud spending in 2018, while discrete manufacturing, professional services, and process manufacturing will account for more than 40 percent of public cloud spending in Germany.

In Japan, the professional services, discrete manufacturing, and process manufacturing industries will deliver more than 43 percent of all public cloud services. The professional services, discrete manufacturing, and banking industries will represent more than 40 percent of China's public cloud services spending in 2018.

"Digital transformation is driving multi-cloud and hybrid environments for enterprises to create a more agile and cost-effective IT environment in the Asia-Pacific region," said Ashutosh Bisht, research manager at IDC. "Even heavily regulated industries are using SaaS for non-core functionality, platform as a service (PaaS) for app development and testing, and IaaS for workload trial runs and testing for their new service offerings."

Containers will continue to make a big noise in 2018 – and Cisco has made its own push with the launch of its own container platform in collaboration with Google Cloud.

The move, which ‘simplifies and accelerates how application development and IT operations teams configure, deploy, and manage container clusters based on 100% upstream Kubernetes’, as the press materials put it, is being played as an extension of Cisco and Google Cloud’s hybrid cloud partnership, previously announced in October. Kubernetes, of course, was originally designed by Google before being donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

The list of certified Kubernetes platform and distribution partners is as long as one’s arm, including Alibaba Group, IBM and Microsoft among others. From Cisco’s perspective, its goal in releasing a Kubernetes-flavoured product is around networking, or more specifically, addressing ‘the end-to-end management of container clusters including setup, orchestration, authentication, monitoring, networking, load balancing and optimisation’.

The Cisco Container Platform will be available on software optimised with Cisco HyperFlex, available in April, and software supported on VM infrastructure, bare metal and public cloud, available in the summer.

“As the adoption of Kubernetes has exploded, container orchestration and management have become of paramount importance to customers because they enable application portability and consistency across on-premises and cloud-based environments,” said Eyal Manor, Google vice president of engineering in a statement.

“Cisco Container Platform is optimised in collaboration with Google Cloud to deliver a next-generation open hybrid cloud architecture, and represents an important milestone for our integrated Google and Cisco hybrid cloud solution coming later this year,” added Manor.

You can find out more about the Cisco Container Platform offering here.

How is DevOps going within your organization? If you need some help measuring just how well it is going, we have prepared a list of some key DevOps metrics to track. These metrics can help you understand how your team is doing over time.
The word DevOps means different things to different people. Some say it a culture and every vendor in the industry claims that their tools help with DevOps. Depending on how you define DevOps, some of these metrics may matter more or less to you and your team.

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Enterprises are adopting Kubernetes to accelerate the development and the delivery of cloud-native applications. However, sharing a Kubernetes cluster between members of the same team can be challenging. And, sharing clusters across multiple teams is even harder.
Kubernetes offers several constructs to help implement segmentation and isolation. However, these primitives can be complex to understand and apply. As a result, it’s becoming common for enterprises to end up with several clusters. This leads to a waste of cloud resources and increased operational overhead.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has just secured $5 billion in quarterly revenues – but what are its most popular products?

According to 2nd Watch, a managed cloud provider and AWS partner, the fastest growing AWS products used by their customers in 2017 include data crunching tool Amazon Elastic MapReduce, with a 24% CAGR, network monitoring offering CloudWatch (23% CAGR) and serverless product AWS Lambda at 18%.

The growth means that 92% of customers polled by 2nd Watch are using CloudWatch in their organisations. Amazon Simple Storage, AWS Data Transfer and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud were used by 100% of respondents.

“We are seeing enterprise customers adopt new services at a much faster rate than in years past, product like Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, Amazon Workspaces and AWS Glue,” said Jeff Aden, co-founder of 2nd Watch. “These products make provisioning, growing and monitoring of AWS incredibly easy, and allow enterprises to focus on their core businesses.

“Large enterprises are capturing the benefits of cost savings, while decreasing their time to market and increasing their ability to make informed decisions,” added Aden.

In total, AWS issued 497 service and feature releases over the most recent financial quarter. New products launched at re:Invent included efforts focused on machine learning and artificial intelligence. The most evident of these was Amazon SageMaker, a service aimed at helping developers build, train, and deploy machine learning models.

Other fast growing AWS products in 2017 included Amazon Chime, an online meeting and video conferencing tool, and AWS Glue, a fully managed ETL (extract, transform and load) data service.

Read more: AWS passes $5 billion in quarterly revenue with a $20bn run rate

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has surpassed $5 billion (£3.6bn) in revenues for the most recent quarter, representing an almost 45% increase year over year and a $20 billion run rate.

The company’s latest financial results show revenues of $60.5bn across the company in the fourth quarter, with particular focus on Alexa. CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement that “we don’t see positive surprises of this magnitude very often – expect us to double down.”

In the company’s highlights section, AWS was mentioned a total of 52 times. Service and feature releases fell just short of 500; the 497 that were released took the year’s total up to 1,430. To put that into perspective, the quarter’s total was more than three times the releases launched by AWS in the whole of 2012.

Brian Olsavsky, Amazon chief financial officer, told analysts that the $20bn run rate for AWS was up from $18bn the previous quarter. “We’re very happy with the performance in the AWS business,” he said.

As it is the first release since re:Invent back in November, product launches featured significantly in the highlights. These included SageMaker, a service aimed at helping developers build, train and deploy machine learning models, as well as products on the artificial intelligence side, including translation and transcription tools.

Of particular interest as well were the heavy-hitting customers the company has secured in the quarter. Some of these, such as Expedia going all-in, and The Walt Disney Company selecting AWS as its preferred public cloud infrastructure provider, were announced at re:Invent back in November. Another, Synamtec, was announced in the week leading up to the event, while others included Dow Jones, Experian and Ubisoft, who ‘kicked off major new moves’ to AWS in the quarter.

So what does this mean when compared to other players in the market? Microsoft issued financials yesterday, with its ‘intelligent cloud’ bucket, focusing predominantly on Azure and server products, fetching $7.8bn for the quarter at an increase of 15% year over year. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that Google Cloud was a $1bn per quarter business and that it was in the company’s opinion ‘the fastest growing major public cloud provider in the world.’

According to Synergy Research, a long-time tracker of the cloud infrastructure players, four of the five largest vendors have gained market share over the last four quarters. The only outlier is IBM, which maintains third place behind AWS and Microsoft, and ahead of Google and Alibaba.

“As demand for cloud services blossoms, the leading cloud providers all have things to be pleased about and they are setting a fierce pace that most chasing companies cannot match,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy. “Smaller companies can still do well by focusing on specific applications, industry verticals or geographies, but overall this is a game that can only be played by companies with big ambitions, big wallets and a determined corporate focus.”

You can read the full Amazon statement here.

How often is an environment unavailable due to factors within your project’s control? How often is an environment unavailable due to external factors? Is the software and hardware in the environment up to date with the target production systems? How often do you have to resort to manual workarounds due to an environment?

These are all questions that you should ask yourself if testing environments are consistently unavailable and affected by outages. Here are three key metrics that you can track that can help avoid costly downtime.

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