Cloud Foundry Investment and Broad Deployments Increasing Year-Over-Year, According to Global User Survey

Broad deployment of Cloud Foundry has nearly doubled in just the last two years, according to the latest report released today by Cloud Foundry Foundation, home to open source projects helping build the future of cloud applications.

The study, released at the Foundation’s European Cloud Foundry Summit in The Hague, revealed that 45 percent of user respondents describe their Cloud Foundry use as “broad” compared to 30 percent in 2018 and 24 percent in 2017 and that 39 percent of developers are deploying applications in less than one day. Nearly one in five respondents started using Cloud Foundry in just the last 12 months, indicating a healthy and growing community of developers.

The broadening adoption is expected to continue with investments in the Cloud Foundry platform deepening. Nearly half of survey respondents report they have at least 100 developers using Cloud Foundry, a significant jump from just one-third last year, and the share of companies with more than 50 applications on Cloud Foundry grew from 24 percent in 2017 to 43 percent in 2019.

According to an analysis by third-party source, which has technology that provides engineering observability over the entire software development lifecycle, the Cloud Foundry project total number of commits per month remains quite high with a total of 50,000 per month over the past year. The highest levels of activity are centered around the Stratos UI project, Istio integrations and the core Cloud Foundry Application Runtime Cloud Controller. In addition, project velocity is on the upswing this year, with average time to merge reduced from eight days down to three days most recently.

“As businesses navigate digital transformation and developers drive innovation across cloud native environments, one thing is very clear: they are turning to Cloud Foundry as a proven, agile, and flexible platform -- not to mention fast -- for building into the future,” said Abby Kearns, executive director at Cloud Foundry Foundation. “The survey also underscores the anchor Cloud Foundry provides across the enterprise, enabling developers to build, support, and maximize emerging technologies.”

The 2019 User Survey also confirmed the positive impact of Cloud Foundry’s developer-first commitment. By eliminating complexities in workflow and reducing application development cycles by weeks or even months, developers are able to focus their attention on the creation of applications.

Key findings from the report include:

Developers Save Time, Companies Save Money: More apps in less time. A plurality of Cloud Foundry users (39 percent) have application development cycles of less than one day. More than three-quarters (77 percent) of users report application development cycles of fewer than three weeks.

Cross-Platform Flexibility Remains Crucial: Cloud Foundry users continue to value the flexibility the platform provides, with 9 out of 10 users citing this as important. Serverless computing usage among Cloud Foundry users is up 10 points (34 percent) from 2018. Notably, this is double the rate of increase in Kubernetes usage, indicating that developer-centric technologies are on the rise.

Confidence in the Platform is Steady and Growing: In a mere two year period, broad deployment of Cloud Foundry has nearly doubled. Nearly a majority (45 percent) of user respondents describes their Cloud Foundry use as “broad” compared to 30 percent in 2018 and 23 percent in 2017.

...And So is Investment in the Platform: A full 41 percent of user companies have at least 100 developers using Cloud Foundry. The number of user companies with more than 50 applications deployed on Cloud Foundry rose to 43 percent compared to 24 percent in 2017. Furthermore, companies that are currently migrating applications to a Cloud Foundry platform is up 11 points (63 percent).

The 2019 Cloud Foundry User Survey is the third in a series of annual surveys conducted and produced by ClearPath Strategies, a strategic consulting and research firm for the world’s leaders and progressive forces.

In total, 306 respondents completed the survey online from March 29 - June 1, 2019. Respondents were invited to participate via Cloud Foundry Foundation emails, newsletters, Twitter, website, and Slack channels, as well as direct invitation from certified platform providers and other members. Of the total respondents, 144 can be identified as “users.” Though companies who distribute commercial versions of Cloud Foundry could also be considered “users,” we exclude them from the analysis of this survey. Numbers may not add to 100 percent due to rounding, or for multi-response questions. Respondents whose questionnaires were substantially incomplete have been excluded from these results. In instances where respondents completed most of the survey, their responses were included. Where they left a question blank, they have been excluded from those specific questions for the purpose of analysis. The Cloud Foundry User Survey outreach and survey were drafted and delivered in English across all geographies.

Cloud Foundry is an open source technology backed by the largest technology companies in the world, including Dell EMC, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Pivotal, SAP, and SUSE, and is being used by leaders in manufacturing, telecommunications and financial services. Only Cloud Foundry delivers the velocity needed to continuously deliver apps at the speed of business. Cloud Foundry’s container-based architecture runs apps in any language on your choice of cloud — Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack, VMware vSphere, and more. With a robust services ecosystem and simple integration with existing technologies, Cloud Foundry is the modern standard for mission critical apps for global organizations.

About Cloud Foundry Foundation
The Cloud Foundry Foundation is an independent non-profit open source organization formed to sustain the development, promotion, and adoption of Cloud Foundry as the industry standard for delivering the best developer experiences to companies of all sizes. The Foundation projects include Cloud Foundry Application Runtime, Cloud Foundry Container Runtime, BOSH, Open Service Broker API, Eirini, CF Containerization, Abacus, CF-Local, CredHub, ServiceFabrik, Stratos, and more. Cloud Foundry makes it faster and easier to build, test, deploy, and scale applications, and is used by more than half the Fortune 500, representing nearly $15 trillion in combined revenue. Cloud Foundry is hosted by The Linux Foundation and is an Apache 2.0 licensed project available on Github: https://github.com/cloudfoundry. To learn more, visit: http://www.cloudfoundry.org.

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