More than 700 development professionals, managers and senior leaders across 20 industries participating in a study by Techstrong Research say that the cloud landscape is changing as buyers increasingly put the developer experience on the same footing as core technical and performance capabilities of cloud infrastructure services.

According to the Techstrong Research report, “Q3 2022 DevOps and the Public Cloud: The Move to the Distributed Cloud”, commissioned by Akamai, respondents focused on their eventual move to the distributed cloud as both a means to provide a global and scalable cloud platform as well as a developer-friendly environment that enables faster and cheaper application deployment than traditional hosting platforms.

The report underscores three major trends:

• First, as cloud consumption continues to scale, cloud platforms must have global reach, significant outbound network capacity, and high data security capabilities. Cloud buyers will consider multicloud architecture to reduce reliance on a specific cloud provider. Still, they need to do sufficient due diligence because migrating between cloud platforms is expensive and time-consuming. Price-performance is the top reason to consider adding another cloud provider, so cloud providers must be wary of saddling customers with an ever-expanding monthly cloud bill. Re-platforming is expensive, but so is staying on a cloud provider that doesn’t aggressively follow the technology commodity curve.
• Second, the next battle in the cloud wars will be fought by cloud platforms striving to appeal to, and win the hearts of, developers. This constituency requires ease of use, simplicity, and programmability from the platforms where they deploy their applications. That makes developer support a huge factor in a cloud provider’s ability to meet the needs of these teams as toolkits, APIs, easily integrated PaaS services, and a thriving ecosystem of pre-integrated third-party add-ons accelerate the developer’s ability to deploy quickly and reliably. Technical support must be responsive and knowledgeable, as developers have little patience for infrastructure issues that hinder their ability to ship code.
• Finally, these two trends will intersect as organizations increasingly look for a global cloud platform with sophisticated edge computing capabilities. Providers with these capabilities will need to control a large global network to cost-effectively deliver these services and a value-added set of application services to allow developers to deploy their applications as close to the users as possible.

Respondents want an easy-to-use, less complex environment that is secure and has the international security and compliance certifications to prove it. Security features accessible within applications remain the most important for organizations looking to switch cloud providers.

As businesses have globalized, the expectation is that cloud platforms will offer connectivity regardless of geographic location and at sufficient scale to meet an application’s peak usage needs. Replatforming applications requires a significant investment to refactor the environment. Organizations are increasingly selecting their cloud providers based on their ability to meet their anticipated scale requirements.

As developers (and DevOps professionals) increasingly weigh in on platforming decisions, key capabilities like open infrastructure, programmable APIs and self-service capabilities via CLI or a web interface are becoming key requirements.

An emerging requirement, for sure, but bringing compute and data much closer to the ultimate consumer of applications will become increasingly important in a more remote and distributed world.