Why is the public cloud industry on a path to waste $400 Billion $ in less than a decade?

The current public cloud tools around Infrastructure and Platform-as-a-Service are trending to be a Trillion $ market in less than a decade!

Three drivers creating runaway waste issues:

Even in 2022, Cloud infrastructure is still complex and challenging to manage while staying within a budget or forecast. Currently, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has 26 Categories, 200+ services, and growing daily (+Azure + GCP), further adding to the complexity and struggle to keep up with demand for skilled labor. With more than 100,000+ open positions for public cloud infrastructure, organizations struggle to find skilled cloud labor. Organizations want employees with dozens of certifications and years of experience to be effective, but with Disparate sets of feature tools required to manage cloud at scale can be up to or more than 60% of cloud spend, which eradicates the benefits associated with public cloud.

So, what’s the answer to addressing runaway industry waste?

• Visibility — A few disparate feature tools were early in the market. Still, they didn’t evolve beyond anything other than showing a problem and very little (if any) automation and/or “operational remediation.”
• Simplicity — Anyone who has used the AWS console will tell you how complex it is, and it’s so specialized it takes part of a career to become a legitimate expert regardless of what the marketing folks say on behalf of the cloud providers.
• Optimization — The “low hanging fruit” for optimization via software comes in four areas:

1. Cost — identification of utilization patterns and acting in simple yet effective ways using automated workflows dramatically reducing waste effectively & efficiently. We need to go beyond just identifying areas where Organizations can purchase things like Reserved Instances.
2. Cloud User Experience — intuitive and simple-to-use interfaces that sit a few layers on top of the public clouds consoles are critical. Organizations need an easy-to-use interface that automates deployments and/or orchestrates the graceful parking of complex workloads, reduces cost risk, and opens a broader range of the labor pool.
3. Enhance Cloud Security — the fact that Ransomware as a Service is now a billion+ industry should make us all collectively hold our breath and realize we must rethink security and compliance, NOW!
4. Unified Cloud Posture Management — having a handful or dozens of desperate feature tools is not a sound strategy and is unfortunately not cost-effective either.

Summary

The public cloud is truly a fantastic collection of innovative and scalable technology. Unfortunately, the adoption rate has outpaced innovation around cost optimization, simplicity, and there isn’t enough skilled labor to fulfill the demand.

Fortunately, whenever there is massive complexity coupled with a lack of available talent, software innovation becomes the outcome of putting a significant dent in the runaway waste trend.

Imagine a future where the technology meets the developer wherever they are via a text or slack message, letting them know a resource has been idle for three days. With a simple swipe of their phone, they can pause or eliminate the workload, optimizing in real-time within seconds.