Sumo Logic’s Top Enterprise Cloud Technology Trends as 2018 Approaches

Progressive enterprises strive to deliver high-performance, highly scalable and always-on digital services. These services are built on custom “modern architectures”—an application stack with new tiers, technologies and microservices that typically run on cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. To better understand modern application usage trends, log management and analytics,

has released its “State of Modern Applications in the Cloud

report, which provides data-driven insights, best practices and emerging trends by analyzing technology adoption within the application stack. The report was based on data from more than 1,500 participants. This eWEEK slide show highlights some key data points.

Linux is the dominant operating system in AWS (80 percent). In less than a year, Linux usage in Azure grew to 16 percent from 4 percent— a 300 percent increase. This data suggests that Linux has become a reasonable choice in any cloud platform.

Docker container adoption in AWS grew to 25 percent from 18 percent in just nine months. Now almost 1 in 4 respondents use Docker in production applications, demonstrating enterprises still rely on containers (and microservices) to build apps.

AWS Lambda serverless computing adoption has almost doubled, to 23 percent in 2017 from 12 percent in 2016. Serverless moves microservices into the future by entirely skipping over containers and DevOps, and this result shows IT leaders are already thinking ahead to NoOps–where applications run in the cloud without an infrastructure.

MySQL is the No. 1 database running in AWS, along with Redis and MongoDB, accounting for 40 percent of database adoption. Legacy vendors such as Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle DB significantly lag in terms of usage in AWS and are used by only 6 percent of combined customers. Traditional vendors are challenged with determining how to remain relevant against newer, more progressive cloud-based databases.

Web servers are a foundational building block for modern applications. NGINX and Apache lead Internet Information Services (IIS) and other web servers in AWS, being used in 3 out of 4 AWS-based applications. The script is flipped with Azure, however, where IIS leads with 77 percent to Apache’s 37 percent.

Application architects have several database choices when migrating to the cloud. In AWS environments, the adoption of NoSQL database has overtaken traditional RDBMS databases, earning 72 percent of the market.

As customer experience grows in importance, many enterprises are adopting content delivery networks (CDN) to improve application and content performance. CDN usage has gone up dramatically in 2017. AWS-native CDN (CloudFront) is the clear leader in AWS (23 percent), while Fastly, a relatively new CDN vendor, and Akamai, the global leader, are experiencing similar adoption.

Security is a top priority for enterprises moving to the cloud, but only 50 percent of enterprises are using CloudTrail, the primary security audit for AWS. Despite heavy publicity about data breaches, survey results show organizations simply aren’t taking advantage of the foundational security technologies offered by the major cloud platforms.