Thread by @QuinnyPig

It's time to put on my Analyst Pants! @RightScale (now @Flexera) has come out with its 2019 State of the Cloud report. It's relevant to my business so of course I read it, but it's... not great. A thread. info.flexerasoftware.com/SLO-WP-State-o… (1/22)

786 technical professionals responded to it. 84% of them have a multi-cloud strategy. I suppose "HELL NO!" probably does count as a strategy. (2/22)

"94% of respondents use cloud." Uh... who doesn't use cloud and responds to a survey about cloud computing? I worry for those people. (3/22)

"13 percent of enterprises spend more than $12 million a year on public cloud." This is a bit misleading. At companies spending over $100 million on a cloud provider, very few people see the complete bill picture. Were they respondents? (4/22)

"84% of enterprises say that optimizing cloud costs is a growing challenge. 84% also say the same for cloud governance." Can you imagine either of those without the other at enterprise scale? (5/22)

"AWS users are only using 47% reserved instances," with of course no mention whatsoever of spot, which is better than RIs from a cost perspective. (6/22)

Let's define our terms before we go further:
All respondents = 786
Enterprise respondents (1,000+ employees) = 456
SMB respondents (<1,000 employees) = 330 (7/22)

To the meat of the report! On average, organizations leverage 4.9 clouds. Uh, hang on--five clouds? AWS, Azure, GCP, your terrifying datacenter, and uh... help? *On average?* (8/22)

Out of 50 pages and WAY too many charts, this is the only one that's got colors that aren't "various shades of blue." What the hell? shares.quinnadvisory.com/aw4RqM1n8IHLF9… (9/22)

Configuration tools used: Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Terraform, and Salt. The term "CloudFormation" appears nowhere in this report, and I'm starting to suspect this may be going off the rails. shares.quinnadvisory.com/0juD3nC86cak2W… (10/22)

Public Cloud Adoption in the Enterprise. Wait. "AWS" and "VMware on AWS" are two separate answers? Did the respondents know this going into the survey?
shares.quinnadvisory.com/hXKjN89om3awY0… (11/22)

One thing's very clear from this graph: RightScale and the AWS icon graphic designers are hiring from the same talent pool. A universe of color out there and you pick "very similar shades of blue?" shares.quinnadvisory.com/yfbFbprgOiHmlR… (12/22)

There's a list of container services and technologies that seems to forget FarGate exists. (13/22)

12% of respondents are using AWS Outpost, a service that is not yet available. Everything else in this list just makes me depressed. shares.quinnadvisory.com/9trwtManDNHqxX… (14/22)

"Number of VMs in clouds." Generally we call them "Instances," but that's a battle I'll fight after my AMI-has-three-syllables war is won. shares.quinnadvisory.com/XWCsJvxyNn5wPI… (15/22)

The summary takeaway is that as the public crowd grows, organizations focus on governing costs, as told by a survey sponsored and run by a company that sells a thing that claims to do exactly that. (16/22)

Now, analysis time: they're continuing to trumpet the multi-cloud story, which may be accurate--but it's not nuanced at all. Multi-cloud per division? Fine. Multi-cloud per workload? Madness. (17/22)

The conflation of technical terms and the omission of very popular entrants in a few of these spaces leads me to believe that either the data is flawed, or the report massages the data to present a perspective. Either is troubling. (18/22)

It also completely ignores one of the biggest stories with how enterprises work. It's not "a few people sitting in an office," it's tens of thousands of people. (19/22)

If I ask both @rikkiends and @chrisshort both about what RedHat does internally, I'm going to get two completely different answers--both honest! (20/22)

It's completely possible that this report got answers of both "yes" and "no" to questions from the same company. (21/22)

A lot of hard work went into this report. I'm just questioning whether all of that effort was based on a sound methodology. It raises more questions than it answers, and I'd exercise caution when citing it. (22/22)