The cloud industry experienced a mix of significant disruptions, security breaches, and emerging trends in 2021. Notable outages included those at AWS us-east-1, Google Cloud, Facebook, and OVHcloud, which affected various services and impacted users worldwide. Meanwhile, security vulnerabilities such as Log4j and Microsoft's zero-day vulnerabilities highlighted the industry's ongoing struggle with security. Research revealed that public cloud providers dominate 61% of global cloud infrastructure spending, while cloud-native technologies like Infrastructure as Code and container orchestration gained popularity in response to COVID-19. Automation became increasingly important for managing rising cloud costs, but many companies still lack effective tools for monitoring and eliminating cloud waste. The industry also saw significant developments in the use of automation, the rise of hybrid and multi-cloud strategies, and major milestones from cloud providers like AWS and CAST AI.