This article draws on findings originally reported by cloudcomputing-news.net, based on an eBook published by digital performance monitoring provider New Relic, titled Achieving Serverless Success with Dynamic Cloud and DevOps. New Relic surveyed more than 500 organisations across the US, UK, Germany, and France.
Three Tiers of Cloud Maturity
Not every organisation uses the cloud in the same way. New Relic’s research segments organisations into three categories based on how they consume cloud infrastructure:
- Traditional data centre users – workloads remain primarily on-premises, with little or no public cloud adoption.
- Static cloud users – applications have been migrated to the cloud, but resource allocation is largely fixed and manual.
- Dynamic cloud users – organisations that automatically allocate and de-allocate cloud resources on the fly, treating resource scaling as a first-class part of application architecture.
The distinction between static and dynamic is not merely philosophical. Dynamic users treat elasticity as a design principle rather than an operational afterthought, enabling them to handle demand spikes efficiently and bring new capabilities to market faster.
What Dynamic Cloud Users Actually Do Differently
According to the New Relic report, dynamic cloud users share several defining characteristics:
- On-demand resource allocation – Resources are provisioned and released automatically in response to real-time demand, rather than being sized for peak load and left running.
- Hybrid and multi-cloud workload distribution – At least 80% of dynamic cloud users split workloads between private data centres and the public cloud, balancing control, compliance, and scalability.
- Multi-vendor strategy – More than two-thirds (68%) of dynamic cloud organisations expected to use three or more cloud vendors within three years of the survey. In contrast, 30% of all survey respondents reported using only a single public cloud provider at the time of the survey.
- Adoption of emerging cloud-native technologies – Dynamic cloud users are 23% more likely than their static counterparts to be using technologies such as Function as a Service (FaaS), containers, and container orchestration platforms.
The Business Case: Measurable Benefits
The research makes a compelling argument that dynamic cloud adoption translates into tangible business outcomes. Compared to static cloud users, dynamic cloud organisations reported:
| Metric | Dynamic Cloud Users | Static Cloud Users |
|---|---|---|
| Improvement in application uptime | 26% | 19% |
| Reduction in operating costs | 21% | 9% |
| Improvement in client satisfaction | 36% | 15% |
The gap in client satisfaction is particularly striking—dynamic cloud users are more than twice as likely to report improvements in this area. The combination of higher uptime, lower cost, and better user experience suggests that dynamic cloud practices create compounding advantages over time.
Why Simple Migration Is Not Enough
One of the key warnings in the New Relic report is that lifting and shifting applications to cloud servers—without rethinking resource allocation—delivers only a fraction of the potential value. As the report puts it:
“To take advantage of many of the most important benefits of cloud computing, you need to do more than simply move all or part of your application to cloud-based servers in a simple migration. And while maintaining some of your applications in the cloud and some of them in your own data centres can be an effective part of a migration strategy, it is not a long-term solution to maximise the benefits of the cloud.”
New Relic, Achieving Serverless Success with Dynamic Cloud and DevOps
In other words, a hybrid deployment model can serve as a useful transition phase, but organisations that stop there leave significant agility and cost advantages on the table.
The Role of DevOps, Containers, and FaaS
Dynamic cloud adoption does not happen in isolation. The research highlights a strong correlation between dynamic cloud usage and the adoption of DevOps practices and cloud-native technologies:
- DevOps provides the cultural and process foundation for frequent, reliable deployments and cross-functional collaboration between development and operations teams.
- Containers (e.g., Docker) package applications and their dependencies into portable, consistent units that can be deployed and scaled rapidly across cloud environments.
- Container orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes) automates the scheduling, scaling, and management of containerised workloads, making dynamic resource allocation operationally practical at scale.
- Function as a Service (FaaS) — also called serverless computing — pushes dynamic allocation to its logical extreme, executing individual functions in response to events and billing only for actual execution time.
Together, these tools and practices form the technical backbone of dynamic cloud usage. Organisations that invest in them are better positioned to respond quickly to changing demand and to retire idle capacity automatically.
Practical Steps Toward Dynamic Cloud Adoption
Based on the patterns identified in the research, organisations looking to move from static to dynamic cloud usage should consider the following steps:
- Audit current resource utilisation – Identify workloads that are over-provisioned or that run at low utilisation for extended periods. These are prime candidates for dynamic allocation policies.
- Adopt auto-scaling – Configure cloud auto-scaling groups or equivalent mechanisms so that capacity expands and contracts automatically based on real demand signals.
- Containerise stateless workloads – Containerised applications are easier to scale horizontally and to orchestrate across multiple cloud regions or providers.
- Evaluate a multi-cloud strategy – Relying on a single provider creates lock-in and limits negotiating leverage. Identify workloads that can run on alternative providers and build portability into your architecture from the start.
- Invest in observability – Dynamic environments change constantly. Robust monitoring, logging, and tracing are essential to understand where resources are being consumed and where problems are occurring.
- Align DevOps practices with cloud architecture – Continuous integration and delivery pipelines, infrastructure as code, and automated testing all reduce the friction involved in making frequent, small changes to cloud deployments.
Key Takeaways
The New Relic research reinforces a straightforward but often overlooked principle: the cloud’s value proposition is fundamentally about elasticity. Organisations that treat the cloud as a static hosting environment recoup only a portion of that value. Those that design their architectures and operations around dynamic resource allocation—using containers, orchestration, FaaS, and multi-cloud strategies—see materially better outcomes across uptime, cost, and customer experience.
For DevOps teams, the implication is clear: cloud migration is a starting point, not a destination. The real work begins when you start building the automation, tooling, and cultural practices that make dynamic cloud usage possible at scale.