Dive Brief:
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Of the scores of cloud services available, 85% of all cloud spend is reserved for four services including AWS EC2, which holds nearly 59% of the market share, followed by EBS, RDS and S3, according to Cloudbility's State of Cloud 2018 report of 1,500 companies accounting for $2.5 billion in cloud spend.
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AWS users specifically use RedShift, ElastiCache, DynamoDB and CloudFront the most, but CloudWatch saw a growth rate of 315% in 2017 as users look to "build out more nuanced architectural components" to the building blocks of EC2, EBS and S3, according to the report.
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A little less than one-third of users continue to use legacy compute instances while 70% have shifted to current generations, which helps to increase performance. The move is indicative of organizations choosing to leverage advancements in processing, memory, storage and networking and thus breaks the "traditional three-year data center hardware renewal cycle," according to the report.
Dive Insight:
Because competition among cloud providers is so hot, prices are continuing to drop, becoming more accommodating to varying budget sizes. For example, compute power in vCPUs increased in the cloud by 84% while the spend has only a 35% rise, according to the report.
Nearly 40% of CIOs turn to cloud-based solutions to cut costs and scale resources for different workloads but to prevent unexpected spending, governance is needed. Because computing power is so much more accessible, consumption limits can often be ignored.
Third-party reporting tools or a consumption hierarchy are needed to monitor a user's rate of data use and flag any overages before costs rise too much.
IT departments depend on cloud management tools to operate different cloud models. But experts suggest using a DevOps tool chain and infrastructure as code technologies to cut the costs of management tools and supplement the already free services offered by cloud providers.
