Kentik, the provider of network analytics for the cloud-native
world, today announced the results of a report it conducted on AWS user
adoption rates, multi-cloud trends, and cloud cost and visibility challenges.
The report, "
AWS
Cloud Adoption, Visibility & Management," compiles an analysis based on
the survey responses of 310 executive and technical-level attendees at the
recent AWS annual user conference, AWS re:Invent.
"We've reached the point where cloud providers have proven
effective as an alternative to the huge overhead of building, maintaining and
upgrading physical infrastructure. But at the same time, the rapid expansion of
public cloud use, as well as multi-cloud, hybrid cloud and cloud-native
environments, has created new challenges for visibility and cost control," said
Jim Frey, former networking industry analyst and vice president of strategic
alliances at Kentik. "Our intent with this study was to look into the current
state of experiences and practices, to help educate the industry and drive conversation
on strategies and solutions to address the challenges."
Key findings in the report include:
- Multi-cloud is real,
and more common than hybrid-cloud. The clear majority of respondents (58%) indicated they
were actively using more than one of the big-three cloud service
providers, i.e. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. While most of the
group (40%) actively use two cloud service providers, nearly a fifth of
respondents (18%) use all three. Surprisingly, only 33% of respondents
reported using hybrid-cloud, with at least one cloud service provider as
well as some type of traditional infrastructure (i.e. company-owned or co-location
/ third-party data centers).
- A common
multi-cloud combo: AWS + Microsoft Azure. It's no surprise that when surveyed
at an AWS user conference, 97% of our survey respondents reported that
their organization actively uses AWS. However, more than one-third (35%)
of respondents said their organization also actively uses Azure, and
twenty-four percent (24%) reported using both AWS and Google Cloud
Platform.
- The biggest
cloud challenge: Cost management (depending on who you ask). Overall, nearly 30% of the
survey-takers said their biggest cloud management challenge is cost
management, with security taking second place with 22% of responses.
However, when looking at the responses by title, challenge rankings
shifted. (Deeper analysis by title is within the full report.)
- There is an
influx of monitoring tools; no clear leader. While the largest percentage of
respondents (54%) reported having a cloud monitoring tool for visibility
into their cloud applications, other tools are being used to attempt to
achieve total visibility, including: log management tools (48%),
application performance management (APM) tools (40%), open source tools
(34%), network performance management (NPM) tools (25%), and more.
- At least two
tools are used to try to gain cloud visibility. Respondents also noted using
monitoring tools together in various combinations for cloud application
monitoring. Fifty-nine percent (59%) of respondents reported using at
least two tools for visibility into their cloud applications. Thirty-five
percent (35%) of respondents use three or more tools for this.
- Spreadsheets are
still being used to understand AWS spend. Fifty-six percent (56%) of
respondents say they use built-in tools within AWS (e.g. CloudWatch) to
track and manage cloud services costs. Another 30% use third-party
commercial tools. However, 10% of respondents reported that their
organization still uses "manual tracking via spreadsheets" to understand
what drives of their AWS data transfer costs.
- A big gap exists
in use of AWS VPC Flow Logs for cloud visibility. While VPC Flow Logs have been
available as a way for organizations to gain more granular, real-time
cloud visibility, adoption ranges widely. While nearly a third (32%)
indicated they are actively using VPC Flow Logs, even more (37%) indicated
that they nothing about them at all (37%).
To download full report
with analysis of the key findings, please visit
kentik.com/AWSReport2019.