This article draws on reporting originally published at ETF Trends and a Motley Fool analysis by Danny Vena. Original post date: July 31, 2020.
Cloud Computing’s Pandemic-Era Inflection Point
The COVID-19 pandemic forced a sudden, large-scale shift in how businesses operate. Social distancing requirements and widespread office closures pushed organizations — many of which had been cautiously piloting remote-work strategies — to make cloud infrastructure a core operational necessity almost overnight.
As Danny Vena wrote in a Motley Fool piece at the time: “Remote work and videoconferencing have combined to cause a notable acceleration in the adoption of cloud computing, a trend that was already well underway.” The pandemic did not create enterprise cloud adoption; it compressed what might have been years of gradual migration into a matter of months.
For DevOps engineers and platform teams, the practical implications were immediate: organizations that had already invested in cloud-native architectures, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code were far better positioned to scale remote capacity quickly. Those still running predominantly on-premises workloads faced a much steeper climb.
Amazon Web Services as a Bellwether
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is widely cited as both the pioneer and the leading provider in the public cloud market. The Motley Fool analysis noted that AWS revenue grew more than 36% in 2019, and framed the broader cloud industry as a “massive multiyear digital transformation” that was still in relatively early stages as of mid-2020.
AWS’s position matters to engineers not just as a market signal but as a de facto standard: when AWS launches or deprecates a service, the ecosystem — tooling, third-party integrations, certifications — shifts accordingly. The pandemic-era growth underscored why cloud providers invested heavily in expanding global region capacity during this period.
The Cloud Stack: SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, and Beyond
One useful aspect of cloud computing ETF fund definitions is that they often force a precise categorization of what “cloud computing” actually encompasses. The Global X Cloud Computing ETF (Nasdaq: CLOU), which tracks the Indxx Global Cloud Computing Index, defines its investment universe across five distinct segments:
- SaaS (Software as a Service): Companies that license and deliver software over the internet on a subscription basis — think productivity suites, CRM platforms, and collaboration tools.
- PaaS (Platform as a Service): Providers that offer a managed platform for building and deploying software applications over the internet, abstracting away underlying infrastructure management.
- IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service): Vendors offering virtualized compute, storage, and networking resources on demand — the layer where most DevOps automation operates.
- Data Center REITs: Companies that own and manage the physical facilities — data centers and colocation sites — that underpin cloud infrastructure.
- Edge and Cloud Hardware: Manufacturers and distributors of the networking, compute, and storage hardware that makes both cloud and edge computing possible.
This taxonomy is a useful mental model for practitioners too. When scoping a cloud migration or selecting managed services, understanding which layer of the stack a vendor operates in helps clarify responsibility boundaries, SLA expectations, and operational overhead.
Two Cloud ETFs Worth Understanding
Global X Cloud Computing ETF (CLOU)
Launched by Global X ETFs, a New York-based ETF provider, CLOU seeks to track the Indxx Global Cloud Computing Index. The fund holds a diversified basket of companies across the SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, data center, and edge hardware segments described above. For engineers, the fund’s holdings at any given time offer a reasonable snapshot of which pure-play cloud companies are considered mature enough for institutional investment.
WisdomTree Cloud Computing Fund (WCLD)
WCLD tracks the BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index, which focuses specifically on emerging public companies primarily involved in cloud software and services. The fund is classified as non-diversified, meaning it can take larger positions in individual holdings than a diversified fund. The “emerging” focus means WCLD’s holdings tend to skew toward growth-stage vendors — companies whose platforms DevOps teams may encounter as newer entrants in the observability, security, developer tooling, or data pipeline spaces.
Why This Matters for Engineering Teams
Cloud ETF composition and performance aren’t just investor metrics — they reflect real market dynamics that affect the tooling and vendor landscape engineers work with every day:
- Vendor viability: Companies with strong revenue growth and institutional investment backing are more likely to sustain their products, offer enterprise support, and continue R&D investment.
- Market consolidation signals: When cloud ETFs add or drop holdings, it often reflects M&A activity or shifts in competitive positioning that can affect which platforms remain independently viable.
- Adoption curves: The composition of “emerging cloud” indices like the BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index can indicate which categories of tooling — say, cloud-native security or serverless observability — are reaching critical commercial adoption.
The Longer-Term Trend
The pandemic-driven cloud surge documented in mid-2020 was an acceleration of a pre-existing trajectory, not an anomaly. Organizations that adopted cloud infrastructure under pressure during COVID-19 have largely retained and expanded those workloads. For DevOps practitioners, this means continued investment in cloud-native skills, tooling, and architecture patterns remains strategically sound — independent of any individual ETF’s performance.
The fundamental drivers — elastic scaling, pay-per-use economics, managed services that reduce operational burden, and global reach — did not change during the pandemic. COVID-19 simply forced a faster reckoning with organizations that had been deferring cloud adoption decisions.
Original source reporting: ETF Trends. Motley Fool analysis cited is by Danny Vena. ETF details reflect information available as of the original publication date (July 2020); fund holdings, index methodology, and performance will have changed.