This is a simple question, deserving a long answer!
While cloud computing is thriving to be adopted in many forms, it is also constantly adapting to changing needs of businesses and providers.
At the time when cloud computing market is rapidly evolving, bringing in new features, price cuts, better management and enhanced reliability, the industry is also evolving into niches delivering robust and innovative solutions.
What kind of business scenarios and benefits can we expect for customers and service providers from such emerging cloud standards? This article will deal with what’s new in public, private and hybrid clouds.
Here’s our take on what’s going to be new.
Let’s first talk about public cloud.
It is imperative and more often than not cloud computing is associated with public cloud.
Not surprisingly, AWS still remains a winner both in terms of market cap as well as bringing new offerings to the market. It has now emerged as a true PaaS provider, and its competitors labelling AWS as only IaaS is not going to work anymore. So, in a nutshell, one can expect more innovations and fireworks from AWS in the near future.
Microsoft Azure on the other hand, has come up a long way. Right from being a PaaS provider and soon realizing to accelerate to the level of providing the VM capabilities, they have worked a lot in maturing their offerings. Now there are many offerings in Azure that match with AWS and even surpass AWS in some cases. One, most interesting thing Azure has done well and expected to do well in future is to work with their existing customers and partners and leverage that strength to accelerate their cloud growth.
Other public cloud providers look distinctly far from the pack. However, we feel a few that could make a great impact are IBM SoftLayer and Oracle cloud. These cloud providers also have some very unique offerings and will continue to offer some amount of innovations in the cloud space.
Private cloud, the next big thing!
OpenStack, in this space, had a dream run and it will continue to. It is the open source community’s mutiny to the commercial cloud players. Moreover, it is being actively supported and sponsored by its near competitors like VMWare and IBM!
The rise of hybrid cloud
Since the time cloud has gone mainstream, businesses are having a tough time choosing a single cloud service to stick to. This is the reason why most businesses are going to engage with multiple cloud providers to meet different demands, which is a mix of public and private clouds.
This will lead to many concerns if businesses can track their resources and costs effectively and maintain the performance of every cloud they use. An increased adoption of hybrid cloud simplifies the public and private cloud through a single provider and is going to become a popular business solution.
So, the overall sense is that market will continue to embrace and adopt cloud and that’s why cloud computing will continue to be a hot cake.
One more interesting new thing that we will witness is interconnected clouds and interoperability between clouds. It may be movement of business from one cloud to another and here we mean, not just from datacenter to cloud. The other business drivers might be:
- Consolidation of distributed resources across multiple clouds to a single cloud
- Bad experience, misalignment with another cloud offerings
- BCP/ DR of critical applications
This is where exciting technologies like Docker will continue to grow since it provides the near perfect mechanism of packaging the applications in a container that can work across any cloud making workload movement across cloud seamless.
A very important and a new solution area that will come to play will be multi-cloud orchestrator solution. It is much bigger than just a common console for managing the services across cloud, it is about managing the policies and controls with the automation.
Cloud will continue to grow over time as it becomes more creative and innovative in how many cloud users apply it to their business models. These new changes will disrupt and transform the industry in the coming days.
