Clouds Are Rising on Many Fronts

While some would declare this to be the age of the cloud, solution providers in the channel need to keep in mind that there are many forms of cloud computing. A new survey finds that when it comes to cloud computing, developers are betting on just about every major public and private cloud to one degree or another. Tesora, a provider of a database-as-service (DBaaS) platform that can be deployed on multiple public and private cloud platforms, conducted the survey of 500 developers in North America. The most surprising data point is the rate at which a relatively immature open-source OpenStack cloud computing framework is gaining on a rival proprietary offering from VMware. Not surprisingly, the survey finds that Amazon Web Services and Google Compute Engine dominate the public cloud space. Given some companies' propensity to shy away from putting databases in the public cloud, the survey suggested that, as of yet, not many of the applications running in those environments would be deemed mission-critical. The survey does confirm that the primary reason customers want to move to any form of cloud computing is cost. Here are key takeaways from the study.