This article is based on a retrospective originally published at devops.com, summarizing the major cloud computing trends observed throughout 2019.
Cloud computing was one of the dominant themes in technology and business throughout 2019. The sector had been on a steep growth trajectory for several years, and 2019 was no exception. Synergy Research Group reported 37% year-over-year growth in the public cloud market overall, and noted that the public IaaS and PaaS markets had doubled in size in just two years, with forecasts pointing to another doubling within three years of that report.
Beyond raw market growth, a number of specific trends stood out as particularly significant in shaping how organizations approached cloud strategy, operations, and tooling in 2019. Here are the six that defined the year.
1. Rise of the Enterprise Cloud Manager
A growing proportion of technical leads at companies of all sizes began carrying job titles that explicitly referenced cloud platforms — for example, “Cloud Architect,” “AWS Engineer,” or “Enterprise Cloud Manager.” Analysis of user data from ParkMyCloud (a cloud cost management platform) found this trend reflected in its own customer base, indicating that cloud infrastructure management was maturing into a dedicated professional discipline.
This specialization signals that organizations are no longer treating cloud as a side responsibility of general infrastructure teams. Instead, dedicated roles now own the design, governance, and optimization of cloud environments — a significant shift in how IT departments are structured.
2. Consolidated Multi-Cloud Views
As enterprises expanded their use of multiple public cloud providers, the operational complexity of managing disparate environments grew proportionally. In 2019, there was a sharp increase in demand for consolidated dashboards and management tools that could provide a single, unified view across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and other providers.
Third-party tools addressing this need allow teams to orchestrate, govern, and optimize hybrid and multi-cloud environments from a single interface. A key driver cited by practitioners was operational simplicity: native cloud provider consoles, while powerful, are not always intuitive or well-suited to cross-cloud management tasks.
3. Multi-Cloud Becomes the Default Strategy
2019 was widely regarded as the year multi-cloud moved from a forward-looking strategy to mainstream practice. Studies conducted throughout the year suggested that more than 80% of enterprises had adopted or were actively pursuing a multi-cloud approach.
The top reasons organizations cited for going multi-cloud included:
- Avoiding vendor lock-in: Reducing dependency on any single cloud provider’s pricing, APIs, or availability.
- Best-of-breed services: Selecting the strongest offerings from each provider — for example, using Google Cloud for machine learning workloads while running core infrastructure on AWS.
- Application efficiency: Matching workloads to the cloud environment best suited to their performance and cost requirements.
4. Automation Expands Across Cloud Operations
Automation has long been a core principle of DevOps, and 2019 saw its continued and accelerating adoption within cloud environments. The ability to automate repetitive operational tasks — provisioning, scaling, patching, cost optimization, and compliance checks — remained one of the primary reasons organizations cited for adopting a DevOps culture alongside cloud infrastructure.
Tools supporting infrastructure-as-code (IaC) approaches, such as Terraform and AWS CloudFormation, continued to mature and gain wider adoption during this period, enabling teams to manage cloud resources programmatically rather than through manual console interactions.
5. Greater Abstraction: Serverless and PaaS Growth
A broader trend toward infrastructure abstraction continued throughout 2019. Developers increasingly adopted models that removed or minimized the need to think about the underlying infrastructure on which their applications run.
Serverless computing — where cloud providers automatically manage server provisioning, scaling, and availability — gained significant traction. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings similarly allowed development teams to focus on writing and deploying code without managing virtual machines, operating systems, or network configuration. This shift contributed directly to faster development cycles and reduced operational overhead for engineering teams.
6. Containers Go Mainstream
Application containerization completed its transition from emerging technology to mainstream cloud practice in 2019. Docker-based container workflows became standard in many development pipelines, and Kubernetes emerged as the dominant container orchestration platform.
Managed Kubernetes services from major cloud providers — including Amazon EKS, Azure AKS, and Google GKE — saw growing adoption, lowering the barrier for organizations that wanted the benefits of container orchestration without the operational burden of managing the Kubernetes control plane themselves.
Containers offered engineering teams portability, consistency across development and production environments, and more efficient resource utilization — making them a natural fit for the multi-cloud strategies that were simultaneously becoming the norm.
Looking Ahead
The six trends described above — specialized cloud roles, consolidated multi-cloud management, multi-cloud adoption, automation, infrastructure abstraction, and container maturity — collectively illustrated that cloud computing in 2019 was not simply growing larger, but growing more sophisticated. Organizations were moving beyond basic cloud migration and beginning to optimize, govern, and architect cloud environments at a level of maturity the industry had not previously seen at scale.
These trends set the stage for the cloud landscape that followed in 2020 and beyond, as the discipline of cloud engineering continued to professionalize and the pace of infrastructure innovation showed no sign of slowing.