As we push further into 2019, it is clear that we are living in a post-cloud world.  The cloud market has matured, and leaders in this market have become entrenched.  We've moved beyond the critical mass as the heavy lifting to create the physical infrastructure that is the global cloud is complete.  And now we find ourselves watching a cloud arms race take place as major providers like Amazon, Microsoft and Google clash with one another in order to achieve dominance.  

But in a similar fashion to the way things went within the onsite data center where companies moved away from being beholden to a single vendor, the same appears to be true with the cloud.  Turbonomic's recent 2019 State of Multicloud survey showed that as well.  All the various benefits that a cloud provider can offer doesn't necessarily matter; at the end of the day, there is still a general dislike or uneasiness with being "locked in" to a single provider or vendor.  This perpetuates cloud competition, and it also continues to push the implementation of multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud.  We are hearing the same things repeatedly with our own readers at VMblog.  However, not everyone agrees or equally fears vendor lock in.  According to the Turbonomic survey, while that was the number one answer to the question "What's more important to you," with 53% of respondents answering vendor lock-in, almost on an equal basis, 47% were just as interested in finding an easy solution looking for a truly abstracted infrastructure without patching, updating, etc.  

Another interesting look into the future found in the survey was the idea of workload mobility across clouds.  Turbonomic stated, "The portability of containers is a key ingredient to realizing a true multi-cloud world.  With their democratization (thank you, Docker) and elasticity at scale (thank you, Kubernetes), we can dream big.  Most IT professionals believe that workloads will move freely across clouds."

Indeed, some 83% of respondents said they believed workloads will move easily across clouds.  

Turbonomic went on to say, "The services that will differentiate clouds are the building blocks of the next generation of applications.  Businesses will uniquely leverage these services to establish their own competitive edge within their industries."

When it comes to multi-cloud, cloud-native technologies are often part of the discussion.  Many of the cloud-native technologies have multi-cloud support and flexibility as a selling point for their adoption.  But, increasingly, cloud customers are choosing hyperscale provider managed services of these cloud-native technologies over the complexity of running the cloud-native technologies themselves.  Kubernetes is an informative example of this as the popularity of managed Kubernetes offerings from Amazon, Microsoft, and Google continue to take off.  

One of the things VMblog learned while attending KubeCon 2018 was that Kubernetes has crossed the chasm to a mature technology, where for the most part, it just works out of the box for most use cases.  And it is expected to grow as developers continue to address and advance security, compliance, and optimization objectives.  As container adoption continues to accelerate, more and more applications will migrate, not just from on-premises to the cloud, but the applications will also undergo a transformation and rearchitecture themselves.  In so doing, vendor lock-in will become even less pronounced, as IT professionals with be rewarded with even more flexibility to seamlessly deploy applications anywhere, or more easily migrate applications to other platforms.

Turbonomic's study is reaching similar conclusions.  Some 26% of environments currently report using containerized applications, but the survey shows this figure is expected to explode over the next 18 months, with a growth rate of 165 percent.  Also following along the findings discussed at KubeCon last year, trust in containerization is sufficiently high in that nearly one-third of containerized applications are now mission critical according to the survey.

And of the cloud-managed services expected to grow the most over the next 18 months, it was no surprise to VMblog to see Desktop-as-a-Service among one of the highest in Turbonomic's survey, with 17% of respondents reporting they will be deploying it over the coming period.  Part of this growth can be attributed to the end of support for Windows 7 desktops.  And with recent industry announcements like Microsoft WVD, the channel will soon find that there are again big opportunities available with cloud virtual desktops.  The entry of WVD will prompt more enterprises to take a further look at Desktop-as-a-Service as one answer to better control IT budget and staffing demands.  Platforms will have to undergo more changes to handle modern desktop environments; and businesses will begin to re-evaluate the way they are delivering RDS and deploying desktops to reduce the cost and complexity of desktop management.  All this further explains the findings from the recent survey.

Additional interesting survey findings included:

• Serverless computing remains in early stages: According to the survey, only 18 percent of IT organizations have adopted serverless computing, and indicate being more than a year away from broad adoption, with 40 percent planning to move forward in the next 18 months. AWS Lambda is leading the market among early adopters.

• Cultural change and skills gap are among top IT challenges: When IT professionals were asked how they would use 30 percent of reclaimed time, the top response was self-educating or learning new skills, followed by modifying internal processes.

• AI/ML will elevate IT careers, fueling AIOps adoption across organizations: As AI/ML adoption grows, Turbonomic findings refute the common perception that automation in IT will eliminate jobs, with the vast majority (9 in 10) believing it will either elevate their careers or have no impact. Furthermore, more than half of organizations are now adopting AI/ML in their applications, and 45 percent are adopting AI/ML for application management. Forty-three percent of organizations are adopting AIOps in 2019, compared to 32 percent in 2018.

To learn more about what your peers said in reference to these and other findings, download a copy of the full 2019 State of Multicloud survey from Turbonomic.