Smack in middle of its teenage years, the cloud infrastructure market looks extremely promising but also comes with new headaches for those that have to manage clouds. SDxCentral Research’s newest report on Cloud Orchestration and Automation/DevOps finds respondents are adopting both private and public clouds and have an increased interest in using multiple public clouds (close to half of SDxCentral survey takers use multiple clouds). However, this explosion of cloud types and rapid adoption creates huge management pain for infrastructure technologists and CIOs across enterprises and service providers.

Since Amazon pioneered its AWS business a dozen years ago, enterprises and service providers alike have embraced the cloud — private, public, hybrid and multicloud. The trend has been fueled by the convenience of having standardized, on-demand, cost-effective infrastructure ideal for migrating existing apps and building new ones. The worldwide public cloud services market is projected to grow 21.4 percent in 2018 to total $186.4 billion, up from $153.5 billion in 2017, according to Gartner. Amazon alone has a cloud business with a run-rate of $20 billion, according to CNBC. And Microsoft is growing rapidly, the company beat AWS in cloud revenues in first quarter 2018.

And now, with the rise of the popularity of containers, both in private clouds (with platforms like Red Hat’s OpenShift) and in public clouds (container-as-a-service), we’re seeing a migration from virtual machines (VMs) on infrastructure-as-a-service to container-based solutions, along with more interest in server-less approaches (functions-as-a-service like AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, and Microsoft Azure Functions). This brings about new challenges for infrastructure engineers that were already scrambling to keep up with upgrading and managing their private clouds, orchestrating private and public clouds, and figuring out how to bring containers to their businesses.

Adding to the need to track new OpenStack releases and upgrade headaches, IT teams now need to figure out whether they should extend their in-house VMware cloud into AWS with VMware Cloud Foundation, or how Google’s partnership with Cisco and VMware/Pivotal should feature in their container platform strategy. Plus they also need to figure out their overall container strategy: whether they should be running containers on VMs, or going straight to containers on bare-metal to reap the efficiencies. And they need to determine the role of public CaaS solutions including Kubernetes-based or proprietary solutions like AWS Fargate and Azure ACI.

This latest report indicates that CIOs, cloud architects, and other IT infrastructure managers need to educate themselves on an increasingly wide variety of options and then determine the key elements of their cloud strategies. That strategy needs to include the following elements:

• Private cloud strategies
  • Legacy apps migration
  • Whether to engage managed service providers
  • Backup and disaster recovery strategies
  • Security implications
• Public cloud strategie
  • Single or multicloud
  •  Cost benefits, compliance and security concerns
  • Networking needs
  • Disaster recovery strategies
• Multi- and hybrid cloud strategies
  • How to balance private versus public clouds and multicloud
  • Key solutions and DevOps and infrastructure skills needed to manage across multiple cloud types