Thread by @QuinnyPig

Oh no it's the @flexera 2021 State of the Cloud report.

info.flexera.com/CM-REPORT-Stat…

A thread...

I kinda tore this apart last year.

https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1255307198210682883?s=20

And again the year before. But enough history, let's see what 2021's version has in store for us!

https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1100893328348831745

First I have to go check my shoe size. Add a few more mandatory fields while you're at it. Yeesh.

Once you fill all of that out, you see this at the very bottom so you get to fill everything out all over again.

You get a sense for who @flexera talks to because the smallest company bucket is "below 2000 employees."

If you don't do one of these things, you don't have a real job.

Of course it works.

And then we finally get access to the report itself. "OH MY GOD IT'S FULL OF STARS" gasps @flexera's stock photography model.

Oh good. They will immediately regret this decision after this Twitter thread I suspect.

The table of contents is 7 pages. What on earth? Let's skip to the good stuff. "Good."

750 people took the survey. As per their download form, that isn't enough people to even form a real company!

First come some highlights. 0.6 of a cloud @ibmcloud rejoices in triumph.

Sounds like those first four attempts at it were just an absolutely smashing success.

Is this real AWS Outpost use, or is it going to be like that time when an earlier year's report said that 25% of respondents were using AWS Outposts before it was released?

The demographics in question. I throw shade, and @flexera responds by throwing up shades of blue.

Most enterprises I know fit into at least 2 categories here.

But at least someone misclicked a color palette and gave us a splash of purple.

This chart is ridiculous and unclear. One thing's for certain: @flexera *definitely* will have absolutely nothing to sell you if you're all in on one cloud provider.

Most of their respondents are giant companies. Those places are large enough that they do a little bit of absolutely everything, with absolutely every vendor. I do not understand the point that's being made here.

Shout out to that fearsome competitor in the cloud cost management tooling space, @msexcel.

By this point I'm starting to suspect that some of the less attentive analysts are convinced that @Azure is winning just because the charts are always shades of blue.

This is the level of annual public cloud spend as perceived by large enterprise employees with presumably unlimited estate-wide visibility and influence but still for some reason fill out surveys like this to win a $25 gift-card or whatnot.

Okay, @flexera, I'll accept that. But now can you please explain something blindingly obvious to me?

"Can do!"

"The emergence of COVID-19 prompted Flexera to add a question to the survey in 2020 that gauges how the pandemic might impact cloud strategy."

The emergence of non-blue colors prompted @flexera to ensure that a graphic designer was fucking fired immediately.

And the last item in the list (expand use of cloud marketplaces) feeds the first item (cost savings) by letting that spend partially qualify for discount commitments, and thus the serpent devours itself.

This is a chart that was included by @flexera to pad the report under the assumption that nobody, absolutely nobody would read this far and still be awake enough to realize that they have absolutely no cohesive narrative behind this data whatsoever.

I dare @flexera to include one more option in next year's survey and report it honestly:

"Speaking slots offered to our executives at @awscloud re:Invent."

The rise of cloud was birthed from a deep loathing of Central IT, but surely this time it will all be different.

According to my dataviz friends, this is called a "Garbage Piano Histogram."

Okay, I can't fault this one any. That's one point for @flexera.

Organizations originally told @flexera that they wasted ~60% of cloud spend, but were told that they weren't allowed to say that about their Data Science teams.

They're called @awscloud Private Pricing Addendums, not "ad-hoc negotiated discounts." Good god, do you think that a $51 billion ARR business unit is going to just YOLO discounting into place like it's the Wild West?!

Addenda*.

The management regrets the error.

I'm just going to leave this one untouched as a special treat for my Kubernetes / Docker friends to discover themselves and dunk upon.

The leading tool is of course "the @awscloud console, then lying about it."

And these things don't all go together at all.

Yes, the long-standing rivalry between @awscloud and @vmwarecloudaws is clearly heating up.

I--am I just out of touch, or is "more than 1,000 VMs in a cloud provider" Enterprise Table Stakes?

What on god's flat earth are you trying to do here, @flexera?

"More advanced organizations use Data Warehouse significantly more than cloud beginners."

That's just... here, take it.

"We plan to use OpenStack" is a leading indicator that people are just checking boxes so they can complete the survey and get their gift card.

I can't wait for @rseroter and @isforat to team up to pitch me Google Anthos as a private cloud.

"Can you summarize all of this into a coherent narrative?"

@flexera: "No."

Allow me to summarize instead. @flexera, please hold my tea...

"We threw a survey together, spewed it out to a bunch of folks, did no structural work on the questions or the responses, turned it into a bunch of charts devoid of context or meaning, and slapped it out into the world."

"Further, the unquestioning reporting on this report as if it contained anything substantive by the tech press clearly demonstrates that you can attain the mantle of thought leadership while demonstrating neither of those things."

This concludes this thread that is entirely too long, about a report that's entirely too longer.