Advanced Computing in the Age of AI | Thursday, March 28, 2024

Multi-Cloud Shift Propels Automation Tools 

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The turn to multiple cloud vendors as customers hedged their bets on ensuring access to critical data and applications is boosting the prospects Amazon Web Services’ competitors, especially Microsoft Azure, which according to a vendor survey saw adoption double over the last year.

An annual report on the state of enterprise applications, cloud infrastructure and emerging “DevSecOps” capabilities found that Azure’s share of the public cloud market jumped to 15 percent over the last year. While AWS (NASDAQ: AMZN) remains far and away the public cloud leader, Sumo Logic reported that the Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT)cloud and other competitors are benefitting from the steady shift of multi-cloud deployments.

Sumo Logic, Redwood City, Calif., touted the results of the cloud application report released on Monday (Sept. 10) as backed by a trove of customer data running on its machine data analytics platform.

Along with confirming the steady shift to production for cloud-based tools like Docker containers and the Kubernetes platform used to orchestrate them, the report also notes growing adoption of secure DevOps tools. DevSecOps is defined as developing, securing and operating cloud-native applications increasingly running on automation platforms like Docker and Kubernetes.

A separate vendor survey released last week by CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) advocated emerging container monitoring tools as a way to gauge enterprise application performance.

As the “life and shift” to the cloud accelerates, the Sumo Logic study found that the on-premise workloads continue their steady decline, dropping 10 percent over the last year. Meanwhile, AWS distributions of Docker and its Lambda serverless service in production register healthy growth of the last year, the report found.

Sumo Logic said one in three customers uses orchestration technologies, “which have become essential for automating and manag[ing] the growing adoption of complex container infrastructure,” it noted. Twenty percent of respondents said they are using Amazon’s Elastic Container Storage, up from 14 percent a year ago. De facto standard Kubernetes continued to make enterprise gains over the last year, adopted by 14 percent of those polled.

Meanwhile, Sumo Logic and other industry surveys note that demand for security and threat intelligence services is growing in parallel with DevSecOps. More than one quarter of those companies polled said they are adopting a combination of cloud-native security services, including AWS CloudTrail, its primary security audit tool, along with AWS GuardDuty for threat intelligence.

Enterprises “are actively monitoring and analyzing their end-to-end tools and processes across the lifecycle with machine data analytics solutions,” the report noted.

About the author: George Leopold

George Leopold has written about science and technology for more than 30 years, focusing on electronics and aerospace technology. He previously served as executive editor of Electronic Engineering Times. Leopold is the author of "Calculated Risk: The Supersonic Life and Times of Gus Grissom" (Purdue University Press, 2016).

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