At the beginning of the year, Gofore once again conducted its traditional cloud project radar survey. In this blog, we’ll take a look at the most interesting results and changes compared to the previous year.
Download the cloud project radar 2025 results (PDF).
Cloud project radar results
The survey was answered by 51 Goforeans. Most respondents were members of the cloud team, either Cloud Specialists or Cloud Architects. Encouragingly, the group also included software developers, technical project managers, and members of the Data & AI team.
Most respondents had been in their current project for a relatively long time, with 43% reporting over two years. The corresponding figure last year was 30%, suggesting that projects are generally quite stable and that some of the same people have continued to gain experience.
The majority of respondents (69%) are working on one project, which allows for good focus without context switching. Only one in ten (12%) are involved in three or more projects.
Only a quarter of respondents (24%) are the sole cloud expert in their project. This is a slight improvement from last year and a very positive development, as in most projects cloud responsibilities are not reliant on a single person. Brainstorming and peer support also work better when there are other experts in the same field. Gofore actively aims to influence this already during the sales phase of new projects.
Looking at the number of years respondents have worked with cloud technologies, it’s clear that this is a highly experienced group: a clear majority (65%) have more than five years of experience. This is a fifteen percentage point increase from the previous year, indicating that respondents have gained more experience.
Gofore has also invested in training: a quarter (23%) of respondents have four or more cloud-related certifications. This is a five percentage point improvement from last year. The result is not surprising, as certification studies are encouraged and passing exams is rewarded. In public sector tenders, certifications are often listed as mandatory requirements.
Remote work has increased further, with the majority of respondents (84%) now working mainly remotely (an increase of about ten percentage points). The remaining respondents, with one exception, work from Gofore’s office. It will be interesting to see next year’s results now that the new Siltasaari office in Helsinki is in use.
According to this year’s survey, the work done by cloud experts is most often infrastructure development or DevOps (both 73%). Respondents also included application developers (41%) and those doing migration and maintenance work (both 37%). This section provides a good cross-section of typical cloud work at Gofore. The biggest and essentially only difference from last year is the increase in migration work (13% → 37%).
In Gofore’s projects, infrastructure is almost evenly split between Azure and AWS. On-premises solutions are negligible, and this time there were no responses indicating use of Google Cloud (GCP). A change is expected next year, as work with Google Cloud is increasing.
In terms of workloads, it’s no surprise that container-based solutions are in the majority (65%), but it is surprising that virtual machines have almost disappeared. This is likely due to the advantages of container solutions and the theoretical possibility of switching “easily” between clouds. Virtual machines are certainly used in almost all projects, but they are no longer the primary solution for running workloads. The large share of serverless solutions (31%) is surprisingly high and represents an increase of about ten percentage points from last year.
Looking more closely at containerised workloads, Kubernetes is, as expected, the most popular solution (31%). AWS ECS is also widely used (29%), as are various Azure solutions (18% in total). The small share of OpenShift (2%, just one response) is a slight surprise. There are no significant changes in these results compared to the previous year.
Infrastructure automation used some form of IaC (Infrastructure as Code) in 94% of projects. The most popular solution was Terraform (40%), followed by AWS CDK and Azure Bicep, both with 21%. Older technologies like CloudFormation and Ansible were marginal. The results in this section are almost identical to last year.
Finally, a look at DevOps tools. Azure DevOps (ADO) pipelines were the most common solution, with a 40% share. Compared to the “market shares” of the clouds, it can be assumed that practically all Azure project code at Gofore is in ADO. GitHub Actions and GitLab CI both had a 22% share. CI veteran Jenkins is now used in only one project, and there were also more exotic tools such as CircleCI and DroneCI.
Interested in working at Gofore?
If the above sparked your interest and you feel you have the relevant skills, and above all, the motivation, don’t hesitate to get in touch! We currently have open positions for both Cloud Specialists and Cloud Architects.
To recap, a Cloud Specialist is primarily a hands-on expert in cloud infrastructure, who lives and breathes IaC code and can broadly take responsibility for building, managing, and maintaining the cloud in customer projects.
A Cloud Architect does the same things, but with a broader scope extending into system architecture. The role also involves a lot of communication and collaboration with customers and Goforeans, including supporting sales when expert input is needed.
