Our guest on the podcast this week is Michael Crandell, CEO and Founder at RightScale. We discuss the early years of cloud computing before it had a name and when it was often referred to as “elastic compute cloud” or “utility computing”. In this time there was a need for a universal cloud management platform, which resulted in Michael creating RightScale. RightScale started as an Infrastructure-as-a-Service model for AWS that provided compile, storage, and networking services. Today, they have expanded to work with all providers including containers. With multiple tools for clients to customize, cloud instances are becoming more and more complex. We look at the State of the Cloud for 2017 and see that for many years people found cloud security to be the single biggest challenge of the cloud, but in 2016 people changed their minds. Today, the biggest cloud challenge is the skills and expertise gap for enterprises implementing a cloud strategy.