Driven in a large part by the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications and continued steps toward digital transformation for late adopters, 2023 was an impactful year for the growing cloud market. As these trends continue, and novel trends inevitably emerge, the cloud market is expected to top $1.2 trillion by 2028.

But not all of the market’s trends lean toward growth. The way in which many cloud adopters have found themselves operating in multicloud or hybrid cloud environments, for example, is set to complicate 2024’s cloud vendor landscape as regulatory authorities continue investigating anticompetitive practices from the leading hyperscale cloud providers.

Before looking too far ahead in the future, we’re looking back at the stories that resonated most with our audience in 2023.

SDxCentral editorial staff kept their heads in the cloud – from service outages at major hyperscale cloud providers to substantial layoffs, bankruptcy declarations and industry-redefining acquisitions.

Here are our top 10 cloud articles of the year, based on aggregate pageviews.

One-time networking and unified communications (UC) industry stalwart Avaya fell again on tough times in 2023.

In February of this year, Avaya Holdings announced that it had entered into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as the company aims to restructure its financial obligations. The next day, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) announced it was starting proceedings to delist Avaya Holdings common stock, which had been trading under the ticker symbol AVYA.

Avaya claimed that its financial restructuring will reduce the company’s debt down to approximately $800 million, which would represent a 75% reduction from the debt load at time of bankruptcy – $3.4 billion.

Thee restructuring was successful, and now Avaya is looking to re-engage with its customers, with renewed focus and product direction for its enterprise communications and contact center offerings. Avaya technically exited from bankruptcy on May 1, reducing its debt load and emerging with a capital structure that gives the company approximately $650 million in liquidity.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) on June 13 confirmed an outage affecting a large number of companies and websites that rely on the cloud provider. From 11:49 am PDT, customers started experiencing errors and latencies with multiple cloud services within its US-EAST-1 Region. A little more than two hours later, at 2:00 pm PDT, AWS claimed many AWS services were fully recovered and it was continuing to work on the full recovery.

According to the cloud provider, the root cause of the issue was traced to “a subsystem responsible for capacity management for AWS Lambda, which caused errors directly for customers (including through API Gateway) and indirectly through the use by other AWS services.”

Later that evening, The Associated Press reported that Amazon said AWS is operating normally.

VMware’s management used couched words like “solid” and “pleased” to describe its second fiscal quarter operating results, seeming to stay in step with the notion the vendor needs saving by Broadcom’s acquisition.

From a numbers perspective, VMware reported a 2% increase in revenues for its second quarter, with mid-year revenues up a more substantial 4% compared to the same period for its last fiscal year.

“We are pleased with our Q2 performance, which reflects the continued strength of our subscription and SaaS [software-as-a-service] portfolio and execution of our business model transition,” CFO Karen Dykstra noted in a statement. (VMware stopped conducting earnings calls following Broadcom’s initial bid last year.)

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced a series of changes to its organizational structure and executive leadership, including the creation of a new Hybrid Cloud business unit. The shakeup aims to streamline operations, focus on key growth areas and unify the portfolio under the successful HPE GreenLake brand.

HPE President and CEO Antonio Neri revealed in a blog post that the new Hybrid Cloud business unit will be led by the company’s CTO Fidelma Russo. The unit will integrate the HPE GreenLake platform with technologies and services of HPE Storage, GreenLake Cloud Services Solutions, and the current Office of the CTO.

As expected, Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware cast a large shadow over the latter’s Explore event last August, with many questioning what VMware might look like if the event has a 2024 edition.

The since-closed deal has resulted in thousands of job cuts across VMware sites around the world. The total number of those cuts might not be known for several months as Broadcom works through the required employment and government filings.

The world of enterprise IT is constantly evolving, and the traditional centralized networking model no longer meets the demands of modern businesses. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this shift towards distributed computing, ushering in the era of distributed cloud networking.

As the digital transformation journey continues, enterprises must adapt and embrace this paradigm shift’s elastic, dynamic, on-demand capabilities. It’s not merely about technology; it’s about staying competitive, secure and agile in a rapidly changing world.

Armo’s open source security project Kubescape joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) sandbox in an attempt to “become that free, open source, end-to-end security platform,” according to Craig Box, VP of open source at Armo.

It was always part of the plan to donate the open source security scanner to the CNCF, he said, citing the difference between DevOps teams’ ideal use of software and code – in an open, transparent way as part of a community – and the way most security vendors design proprietary solutions.

While some may arrive at multicloud on purpose, most are getting there organically. In fact, multicloud really is a natural progression of an organization’s requirement to leverage best-of-breed technology from any number of cloud providers to enable innovation. As a Deloitte survey showcases, innovation is the true value of cloud computing.

Those charged with building innovative solutions to take a business to the next level of value must mix and match technologies such as databases, artificial intelligence systems, and application development and deployment platforms to find a truly optimal solution. If you settle for certain technologies because your single “primary” public cloud provider supports them, you could not only leave money on the table, but also reduce the optimized value that cloud computing can bring to your organization.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella sent an email to the company’s nearly quarter-million employees in January to explain why the cloud provider is shelling out $1.2 billion to lay off slightly less than 5% of its total workforce.

According to the email, those 10,000 jobs are no longer needed to meet the cloud hyperscaler’s long-term goals or customer demand in light of the continued advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) and shuttered enterprise spending caused by economic uncertainty.

Nvidia’s enterprise-grade artificial intelligence (AI) software and supercomputing platform are now available on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) in a move to provide joint capabilities that will give Oracle a foothold in the growing AI market.

With Nvidia AI Enterprise and Nvidia DGX Cloud on OCI, enterprises can access Nvidia’s end-to-end AI development platform and deploy generative AI (genAI) applications on Oracle’s cloud infrastructure.