Amazon Web Services Inc.’s rivals are gaining on it thanks to the rise of hybrid cloud adoption among enterprises, according to a newly published cloud report by RightScale Inc.

RightScale’s annual State of the Cloud Report reveals that the shift to multi-cloud infrastructure away from on-premises hardware has resulted in significant gains in market share for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. It says those gains reflect a steady shift to hybrid cloud implementations among enterprises keen to avoid vendor lock-in.

In total, 85 percent of respondents in RightScale’s survey of corporate cloud users, which includes 1,002 technology professionals at large and small enterprises across a broad cross-section of industries, have adopted a “multi-cloud approach,” up 3 percent from a year ago.

That increased adoption translates into gains for both Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc., RightScale said. Cloud leader AWS retained its commanding 57 percent market share in the public cloud, but Microsoft’s share rose by 14 percent to 34 percent of the market. Meanwhile, Google saw its own share increased to 15 percent of the market in 2016.

Even so, actual usage of AWS’s cloud far outpaces that of rivals. “AWS holds a significant lead in the number of [virtual machines] its users are running,” RightScale said. It notes that 28 percent of respondents have more than 100 VMs running on AWS, compared with just 13 percent running over 100 VMs on Microsoft Azure.

The fourth-biggest cloud player, IBM Corp., also saw a slight increase in its share of the public cloud market, reaching an 8 percent share overall. There was bad news for Oracle Corp., though, which lost market share in the last year.

The public cloud players’ gains came at the expense of private cloud firms, which saw adoption curtailed in 2016 as enterprises opted for hybrid infrastructure. VMware Inc., which RightScale describes as the private cloud leader, saw declines in vSphere and its related offerings in the last year, though its vCloud Suite retained its 19 percent market share.

The survey also looked at the popularity of application containers, and found that the software is making headway as a leading tool for DevOps. The Docker Engine surpassed Chef as the most popular cloud development platform in 2016 with a 35 percent market share, while the latter saw its share fall to 28 percent. The container orchestration tool Kubernetes saw its share of the DevOps market double to 14 percent in 2016.

RightScale said that overall, DevOps adoption is expanding rapidly in the enterprises, becoming the default approach for the development of cloud-based applications. “Overall DevOps adoption increased from 74 to 78 percent this year with enterprise adoption reaching 84 percent,” the report found.

Image courtesy of RightScale