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Why Cloud Foundry can save you time and money

A User Survey for Cloud Foundry Application Runtime, produced by ClearPath Strategies, was released recently revealing cost savings & flexibility for users. I want to showcase a number of key findings and my opinion on what that means for businesses here in the UK before the Cloud Foundry Europe Summit.

The latest Cloud Foundry findings

Cloud Foundry Application Runtime is a platform used by large enterprises to develop and deploy cloud-native applications allowing the ability to save significant resources and time. The majority (43%) of users identify themselves as Developers or DevOps, with the next largest group being Architects (31%).

The 7 key findings from the survey include 1. Freedom & Flexibility, 2. Productivity, 3. Maturity, 4. Economy, 5. Diversity, 6. Scalability and 7. Universality.

1. Freedom & Flexibility

Cloud Foundry Application Runtime allows Developers to do more of what they want to do — code. The influence that Cloud Foundry has on businesses is the ability to offer shorter time to market.

2. Productivity

Application cycles go from weeks or months to hours or days. The survey indicates that users who require over three months per app drops from 51% to 18% after deploying Cloud Foundry Application Runtime. On the opposite side, users who require less than a week jumps from 16% to 46% once deployed.

Pre and post cloud Foundry App

3. Maturity

Cloud Foundry Application Runtime has seen an uptake from new enterprises and SME’s, with 45% of all users using the platform for less than year, to only 15% with more than 3 years usage.

Currently, 61% describe their deployments as trial or PoC evaluations, with the other 39% stating total integration to company wide deployment.

More companies are dedicating their development team to cloud-native applications on Cloud Foundry.

Cloud Application runtime

4. Economy

By saving huge amounts of developer time, users also see a good return on their financial resources. Savings tends to scale, both with deployment and size of company.

Most Cloud Foundry Application Runtime users are using containers by virtue of managing their applications within PaaS (59%), however, 26% manage them with tools such as Kubernetes or Mesos, with 15% with in-house tools.

Cloud Foundry and containers

The survey also reported back the difficulty in getting started with Cloud Foundry Application runtime as Average, with some some tweaks for simplicity to be made.

However, the results for users who would recommend Cloud Foundry Application Runtime to a colleague are a high 83%, with only 6% unlikely to recommend it.

Cloud Foundry recommendations

The primary function for Cloud Foundry Application Runtime, is for users to develop, deploy and manage their cloud-native applications. Below shows a number of apps deployed by users for a variety of applications; Microservices (54%), Websites (38%), internal business applications (31%), SaaS (27%) and legacy software (8%).

Cloud app deployment

 

Also, 53% of Cloud Foundry Application Runtime users operate in a multi-cloud environment with that split between AWS (54%), vSphere (40%), Azure (30%), OpenStack (22%) and Google Cloud Platform (19%). An additional 17% run on a variety of PaaS, such as Bluemix.

5. Diversity

Concentrated industries include IT and Financial services as well as automotive, electronics, telecoms and government.

Cloud Foundry industries

User Industries

6. Scalability

The report found that 49% of users are large enterprises ($1b+), 39% from SME’s (under $100m) and 12% in between ($100m to $1b).

Cloud Foundry enterprise

7. Universality

Users of Cloud Foundry Application runtime do span the globe, with a focus on North America, Europe and Asia, with 6% specifically in the UK.

 

Cloud Foundry globally

Opinion

With the Cloud Foundry Europe Summit 2017 taking place in Basel next week, I am keen to hear first hand from some of the users that have been reported through the survey. In my day to day work, I have experienced the demand for Cloud Foundry knowledge increase through my clients here in the UK, whether that be through Proof of Concept or evaluation pieces, into integration and digital transformation projects.

With presence from Swisscom, Allianz and SAP, it will surely provide great insight from those working with Cloud Foundry, and the benefits they have seen and experienced.

In closing, the User Survey highlights the cost saving, time saving and flexibility that Cloud Foundry Application Runtime offers, and I can see similar trends to the way that AWS became an option for the SME market.

You can find access to the full report produced by ClearPath Strategies here — https://t.co/NW5MdlJKzW

Author : Gary Stefano - Explore Cloud - gary.stefano@exploreltd.com

Added 5-Oct-2017

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