267: Cloud Maturity – Still Rarer Than a Unicorn Sighting

Welcome to episode 265 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week, Jonathan, Ryan, and Justin are trying to keep cool in new WorkSpaces Pools, avoiding the Heatwave with Oracle’s new LLM,  taking a look at AWS Jamba (hold the straw) and taking a look at the ever elusive Cloud Maturity. 

All this news and more, this week on The Cloud Pod! 

Titles we almost went with this week:

• The Cloud Pod takes a dip in the Workspaces Pool
• The Cloud Pod Lineage view is suspect
• A Gitlab, A BitBucket, and a Blueprint build a Workspaces Pool
• AWS goes for a Jamba Juice 
• Google Cloud Autokey does exactly what it sounds like
• Oracle LLM Heatwaves send us to the Amazon Workspace Pool
• Jonathan is unimpressed with this weeks show
• Highway to the DataZone 

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless! Want to reach a dedicated audience of cloud engineers? Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel and let’s chat! 

General News

01:03 HashiCorp State of Cloud Strategy Survey 2024: Cloud Maturity is Elusive but Valuable

• Hashicorp just released the results of its State of Cloud Survey, and guess what? Cloud maturity is pretty elusive. Weird…
•  Hashicorp finds that 8% of organizations qualify as Highly Mature, this results that the biggest benefits are cloud is only going to a small group of truly mature organizations. 
  • Justin wonders if this is part of the cloud repatriation push? 
  • Are other listeners seeing some of this, especially on places like LinkedIn? We’d love to hear. 
• Trailblazers are finding faster development speed, lower costs and reduced risks while others continue to struggle to create haves and have nots with enterprises getting different business outcomes. 
• Hashicorp collected responses from almost 1,200 technology practitioners and decision makers at organizations with more than 1000 employees. 
• 66% of respondents report that they have increased cloud spending in the last year, but 91% believe they are wasting money in the cloud, and 64% are experiencing a shortage of skilled staff.
• 45% of low maturity organizations are still waiting for their cloud strategy to pay off!
• One of the key takeaways from the survey is that the path to cloud maturity increasingly relies on platform teams to help automate and systemize cloud operations. 
  • However, only half the respondents 42% say they rely on centralized platform teams to standardize cloud operations throughout their organization. 
• Platform teams help manage cloud, but also help address the skills shortage that has long plagued enterprise cloud adoption.
• If only they’d pay for training.

03:22 Jonathan – “The skill shortage thing really bugs me sometimes because there are plenty of skilled workers around and the reccs aren’t open for them. So I don’t think there aren’t qualified staff… yeah, it’s not a shortage because of the lack of people. It