Are Private Clouds Proliferating?

The average number of private clouds being used or experimented with jumped 3.9 to 4.9 in the latest study Flexera 2021 State of the Cloud Report. That’s more than the average 3.4 public clouds in the same study. Google Anthos rapidly picked up users and Amazon Web Services‘ Outposts also saw gains.
On the “private cloud” side of the fence, VMware’s vSphere continues to face attrition, as the concept of private cloud has evolved. In recent years many companies have transitioned to a container-centric world. Data elsewhere in the survey indicates that VMware’s market position is stabilizing around the Tanzu portfolio for managing infrastructure.
Will the increase in private clouds be linked by what they have in common, or by the differences in architecture and technology stacks used by each clouds’ unique mix of configurations?
The distinction between public and private cloud has become less important over the last 10 years, although some corporations have tighter restrictions on private cloud workloads. The New Stack’s own research indicates that workloads hosted in data centers are expected to grow, more at the expense of traditional IT rather than migration from public cloud to achieve cost savings.
Enterprises continue to use private clouds as they replace outdated data centers using cloud native technologies. A reported rise in workloads being pushed towards the edge will find more private clouds available to manage them. Whether or not these clouds will have a standard architecture is up for debate, and depends on the level of cooperation between industry hardware vendors, cloud providers and companies differentiating themselves in the “edge computing” category.
Amazon Web Services and VMware are sponsors of The New Stack.
Feature image via Pixabay.