Clear Skies Coming to The Cloud

Featured article by David Grimes

Over the last few years, cloud industry discussions have been largely about demystifying the trends versus hard and fast business benefits. It’s not that the value isn’t there, but every organization has its unique requirements and challenges when it comes to the cloud so it has taken some consideration and strategic planning to understand the business impact and value before moving towards broad implementation within the enterprise.

As an industry we are now moving into a second wave of cloud (or cloud 2.0 as some would call it), where adoption is on the rise and the technology is expanding into more areas due to emerging forces such as predictive analytics and the Internet of Things (IoT). A survey conducted by IDG revealed that 72 percent of IT decision makers have made cloud investments and a majority of respondents also said that by the end of 2016 more than half of their IT assets will be in the cloud. So now that it’s clear that the cloud is here it stay, the question becomes – “what’s the next big thing in store for cloud?”

While there likely isn’t another cloud type revolution happening in the next two, three or even five years,we can expect the industry conversation to focus more on evolution than revolution – bringing more clarity around how we understand the cloud and how it largely functions today within the enterprise. As we move into a refinement period enterprises will begin to clearly identify the value of the different types of cloud services. For instance, Platform as a Service (PaaS) has been around for a while now, but many companies haven’t taken the steps to transition from IaaS based approaches to PaaS. While PaaS has its benefits, the investment required on the part of the enterprise in terms of application re-architecture and developer skillset is often a barrier to entry.

This next wave is also about understanding that the application/user experience is what matters. Infrastructure is really just an enabler. The focus has to be on what the infrastructure enables, matching the application needs to the right infrastructure model, and doing it all with an economic model that makes sense. To give an example, Silicon Valley Community Foundation was hosting their main application in the cloud with their previous provider, but performance and availability were causing issues with the user experience. Donors weren’t able to access the main portal and it was causing frustrations. They had to find a solution that not only could provide the infrastructure, but also would ensure a positive end user experience. Not all clouds are the same.

Lastly, the reality is that not everyone is going to be developing in a cloud native approach and the born in cloud success stories – such as Netflix, Uber and Airbnb– are few and far between. As an industry we’ll come to see that the majority of cloud adoption will come from existing enterprises that will move mission critical infrastructure and applications to the cloud in larger numbers.

Now, this isn’t to say there aren’t potential technology disruptions simmering that will have a notable impact on the cloud. Here are three you should take note of:

– Flash storage: We are beginning to the see the impact of flash storage as a truly disruptive technology. We are seeing an inflection point where the economics and the technology value of flash are aligning. If you look at the way databases run and have always been architected and the way we thought about storing data, the performance characteristics of spinning media have prevented certain types of ways of doing that. But now that flash has rapidly matured (fewer startups, bigger players, and lower price points) we are rethinking how to write applications and manage data.

– Memrister or RRam (resistant RAM): This is one technology that piggybacks off the concept of flash as a disruptor. As we’ve moved ahead the deluge of data has become a problem for businesses – not so much the ability to process data, but the ability to manage and have efficient access to the data itself. The technology is essentially a merging of memory and storage, where the thinking shifts from compute first and memory and storage second, to thinking of computing as being first and foremost a memory and storage problem.

– Containers: Looking 10 years down the line, containers have huge potential as a disruptive technology, but it’s going to be a while before the technology and industry gets there. While containers provide the ability to scale horizontally, it also brings with it the relative concerns of security and also the lack of critical mass of production grade applications. We are challenged as an industry, at least right now, as the base of available developers that can effectively leverage the technology is still quite small. One of the challenges of any disruptive technology, and specifically as it applies to containers, is the lack of qualified people taking advantage of the good the technology has to offer.

There is no doubt the cloud has and will continue to be an enormously influential technology and it will be an exciting ride to see where it takes us.