Trends Report Shows Rising Concern over Cloud Lock-In

Mary Meeker dedicated a section of her Internet Trends report to cloud. She found increasing concerns among enterprises about cloud provider lock in, for instance. Although she didn’t explicitly state it, this finding could be problematic for Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS).
The comprehensive annual Internet Trends 2017 report painted an optimistic picture of AWS and cloud computing overall. The report noted that cloud spending is increasing faster than traditional datacenter spending and that AWS remains the most popular cloud provider.
Meeker began her report series in 1995. She has been a part of it ever since, most recently as an executive at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The report, which is 355 pages long, is light on text and commentary. It also contains a lot of data and graphics. This report draws heavily from material from many sources and is presented as a slideshow.
Here are some cloud-related tidbits taken from the latest report. It states that enterprise cloud adoption has reached new heights and is creating new opportunities.
Spending
Based on data from research firms IDC, Gartner, and CloudHealth, the report shows that combined spending on public cloud and private cloud is similar to traditional datacenter spending.
Cloud spending has steadily risen from 25% of IT infrastructure spends in 2013 to 37% in 2016, while traditional datacenter expenditures have decreased by 4 to 5 percent each year.
The report also states that cloud spending has increased by 37% since 2014 to $36 billion.
[Click on the image to see a larger version] IT Infrastructure Spend, Global, 2014-2016 (source: Internet Trends 2017). IT Infrastructure Spend, Global, 2014-2016 (source Internet Trends 2017). Public Cloud Adoption Trends
As in other studies, the key takeaway is that AWS continues to be the industry leader while competitors Microsoft Azure (and Google Cloud Platform) are chasing it. These competitors, along with IBM, saw an increase in the percentage of respondents reporting that they used their platforms between 2016 and 2017, while AWS remained steady — although still far ahead.
[Click on the image to see a larger version] Public Cloud Adoption Trends (source: Internet Trends 2017). Public Cloud Adoption Trends (source: Internet Trends 2017).Cloud Concerns
The 2017 report found that cloud computing has been a major concern for enterprises since 2012, when it was first reported. Basically, in that timeframe, the share of survey respondents citing criteria as a top-three concern shows a shift from worries about data security and cost uncertainty to worries about vendor lock-in and compliance/governance issues.
In those four years, data security was a top-three concern for respondents. It fell from 42 to 35 percent. Uncertainty about costs and savings declined from a respondent rate of 38 percent to 21%.
Conversely, compliance/governance respondent percentage grew from 21 percent to 27 percent, while lock-in (the ability to change vendors) grew even more important, going from a respondent percentage of just 7 percent in 2012 to 22 percent in 2015.
Cloud Concerns (source: Internet Trends 2017). Cloud Concerns (source: Internet Trends 2017).Cloud Evolution/Tools
This area was seen as paving the way to innovation in the infrastructure landscape.
New software delivery methods such as APIs or browser extensions offer new capabilities for both end users and companies.
Containers and microservices make development easier and offer other benefits such as reducing complexity in managing and updating apps, and improving consistency between production and testing environments.
Elastic analytical databases like Google BigQuery, Snowflake, and AWS Redshift spectrum are almost infinitely scalable and usage-based with minimal maintenance.
Edge computing is removing compute functionality from the centralized node