5 New Use Cases for the Public Cloud

Public cloud adoption has grown significantly over the past few years, with spending on public cloud services expected to exceed $127 billion in 2018, up from $56.6 billion in 2014, according to industry analyst group IDC. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is still the most popular public cloud in the world, pulling in more than 35 percent of total public cloud market share in Q3 2015. Smart organizations are finding new ways to leverage the low-cost "extended data center" capabilities provided by the public cloud.

In this slideshow, Ravello Systems has identified the five most popular new use cases for public clouds (listed in no particular order). Traditionally, it's been either difficult or nearly impossible to run these workloads in the cloud due to various limitations such as lack of access to Layer 2 networking or restrictions on penetration testing.