In preparation for an panel discussion for a future of cloud computing event in Israel, Geva Perry a frequent speaker on cloud computing at corporations and industry events, published his predictions on the future of cloud computing.
[...] I wrote down a few of the concepts I've been thinking about for the past several years and I thought I would share them with my readers to get some feedback. Keep in mind these are long-term predicitions and trends (in no particular order).
As such cloud computing vendor offerings have different flavors depending on the services offering. Broadly services offered in the cloud are classified as Software as a Service, Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service based on the solution stack. He predicts ...
- PaaS Rules: IaaS becomes niche. In the long-run, IaaS doesn't make sense, except for a limited set of scenarios. All IaaS providers want to be PaaS when they grow up.
- Public Rules: Internal clouds will be niche. In the long-run, Internal Clouds (clouds operated in a company's own data centers, aka "private clouds") don't make sense.
He believes that there would be specialized clouds based on a number of factors. Different cloud platforms have different characteristics and so also, the applications that it supports. Not only are there various factors that are dictated by the nature of the business, but there are also regulations by various authorities, such as enterprises, banks and for that matter governments; privacy needs; and in general the performance characteristics. He asserts its not a one size fits all. In addition it brings up these questions about standardization, portability and the vendor ecosystem with his predictions.
- The Control vs. Freedom Debate: Freedom is the catch-all phrase for drivers of cloud adoption (no upfront costs, on-demand, self-service, empowerment of the rank & file - e.g., developers), but control (or lack thereof) is the catch-all phrase of barriers to adoption by large enterprises.
- Cloud Federations - [...] in any business that relies heavily on trust, such as IT, nothing beats a local brand. So people will flock to the cloud of their trusted national telco or big IT provider. But on the flip side, they will need to reach a global audience and will want servers around the world. As a result, we will see the formation of cloud federations [...]
- Cloud Standards: [...] it is also inevitable. We will, however, see multiple competing standards. At least one formal stand ard specification from a standards body and several de facto standards from large commercial players such as Amazon and VMWare.
- The Ecosystem Wars: [...] Success in building an ecosystem will be a determining factor in who wins and loses in the cloud. It is not just about the size and breadth of the ecosystem, but how well it all works together.
- Horizontal and Vertical Consolidation: As with any industry, as cloud computing matures, it will consolidate. This will happen both horizontally, for example large IaaS players will roll-up regional and smaller IaaS and hosting providers [...]
We've highlighted some of the predictions from his original post. What do you think about these predictions?