As part of this year’s sprint through more than 300 slides on the state of technology, Kleiner Perkins’ Mary Meeker highlighted a couple of interesting facts about cloud computing: cloud buyers are kicking the tires of multiple vendors while becoming much more concerned about vendor lock-in.
Meeker’s annual presentation at the Code Conference is a whirlwind of facts and anecdotes about the overall technology landscape, and while a lot of it is old news to people who live and breathe these technologies, it’s a good barometer of what the broader market thinks about tech. (The full presentation can be found here.)
When it comes to cloud computing, Meeker’s slides called out a sharp increase in the number of buyers who are citing the possibility of lock-in as one of their top three concerns in moving to the cloud, with 22 percent citing that as an important concern in 2015 compared to just seven percent of buyers who thought this was a major concern in 2012, according to data from Bain’s Cloud Computing Survey. Grumbling about lock-in has become more pronounced over the last few years as AWS consolidates its market share and continues to crank out compelling new features that require just enough customization work to embrace.
Meeker also cited statistics from RightScale showing that more people are experimenting with running apps on Microsoft Azure than on AWS, and as many people are experimenting with running apps on Google’s cloud as there are experimenting with AWS.
Part of that is because a ton of people are already running apps on AWS, so there’s not as many buyers who need to experiment with Amazon’s cloud. But the percentage of respondents to RightScale’s survey who are actually running applications on AWS remained unchanged from last year to this year, while the percentage of respondents running apps on both Azure and Google Cloud Platform increased sharply over the same period.
