8 Upcoming Trends in Cloud Computing

– Anand Pal, DGM IP Division, Alcatel-Lucent India

Few years, cloud computing promised to deliver a range of benefits, including a shift from capital-intensive to operational cost models, lower overall cost, greater agility and reduced complexity. It can also be used to shift the focus of IT resources to higher-value-added activities for the business, or to support business innovation and, potentially, lower risks. However, these prospective benefits need to be examined carefully and mapped against a number of challenges, including security, lack of transparency, concerns about performance and availability, the potential for vendor lock-in, licensing constraints and integration needs. These issues create a complex environment in which to evaluate individual cloud offerings.

While organizations search for a long-term strategy to combine their internal system with the cloud, providers continue to offer greater benefits, such as big data analytics and application services, lowering the playing field for small businesses.

If we talk about trends in cloud for next one or two years, don’t expect there to be a lot of new technology, rather a shift in emphasis. Movement to vertical applications will become more common. Companies are looking to move daily business services to the cloud. That change is only possible if they can tailor cloud services to their own operations. Consequently, interest in platform as a service (PaaS)will grow. But finding cloud application developers will become an issue for companies. DR (Disaster recovery) will be another area of keen interest. Traditionally, such systems have been a problem for IT. But cloud enables them to address many previous problems – testing DR systems, combating the high cost of installing a backup system and accurately mimicking potential disasters.

Anand Pal DGM IPDivision ,Alacatel-Lucent India

There are few technologies which will become trend in next year are:

1. REST API or Cloud APIs

So-called REST interfaces and API (application programming interface) management solutions will help developers and IT departments to integrate multiple cloud and on-premises services.

REST is a simple way to organize interactions between independent systems. It’s been growing in popularity since 2005, and inspires the design of services, such as the Twitter API. This is due to the fact that REST allows you to interact with minimal overhead with clients as diverse as mobile phones and other websites. In theory, REST is not tied to the web, but it’s almost always implemented as such, and was inspired by HTTP. As a result, REST can be used wherever HTTP can.

Many consider APIs to be the best method for organizations to access services provided by cloud computing vendors. Cloud consumers use APIs as software interfaces to connect and consume resources in various ways, though the optimal or contemporary route is to use a Restful protocol-based API. Read on to gain an understanding of what APIs are and how they are used—particularly when it comes to REST APIs and cloud computing services.

2. Use of Containers

The most significant developments will be the use of containers around application distribution, cost effectiveness and portability. There will be a renewed focus on automation tools that deal with containers, including those that provide automated app or component portability based on pre-defined criteria.

The value will be the ability to reduce complexity by using container abstractions. Containers remove dependencies on the underlying infrastructure services, which reduces the complexity of dealing with those platforms.

One reason we expect to see the cloud rush intensify in 2015-16 is that containers have helped solve some of the problems the cloud poses for IT operations. Developers already love containers, but operations teams need to be able to containerize different parts of an application, move them into different types of cloud infrastructure, and manage them as discrete units while keeping the parts acting as a whole.

3. The public cloud will go hybrid

It’s not enough for a cloud provider to simply connect their data centers to the Internet -- they need multiple private-line carriers to bring enterprise data into the facility in a secure and compliant way. As cloud computing has gone mainstream, it seems businesses have had a hard time choosing just one cloud service to stick to. In fact, a report by Virtustream found that most businesses employ multiple cloud providers to meet different demands, including a mix of public and private IaaS clouds. This amount of cloud sprawl has led to concerns about whether businesses can track their resources and spending effectively and maintain expertise on every cloud they are using. While it seems that companies won’t be scaling down to just one option anytime soon, an increased adoption of a hybrid cloud that simplifies the public and private cloud mix through a single provider is quickly becoming a popular business solution.

4. Price war leadership will move to second

tier CSPs

A two-tier public cloud structure will increasingly take shape throughout 2015-16. The top tier will continue to be Amazon, Azure, SoftLayer, and Google Compute/App Engines. But independent developers, startups, small businesses, and tech-savvy dabblers will gravitate to a low-price, minimalist infrastructure tier. A slew of them are now springing up, seeking to capitalize on the model set by DigitalOcean, which is now the third-largest hosting provider in the world, according to Netcraft.

That doesn’t mean DigitalOcean is the third-largest cloud provider in terms of revenue or physical data center servers. In its ranking, Netcraft is counting the number of public-facing IP addresses inside a service and rating services based on this measure. Netcraft counted 124,000 such servers at DigitalOcean, which earned its number-three ranking.

5. Performance & Security Management

While security and loss of control were the primary concerns of IT managers when the cloud first landed, it seems the main emphasis is now on cloud performance. Businesses want to know that the service will be reliable and perform up to the capacity they need without failing during critical periods. At the same time, since the cloud is now a tried and tested technology, organizations increasingly trust it with sensitive applications.

6. The world relies on Openstack

As the Openstack community has continued to evolve and mature the Openstack offering, an amazing thing has happened; all the competitors have fallen away. There is only once choice standing. Happily that choice, Openstack, offers a robust and mature cloud resource management environment. As cloud continues to evolve, varied and competitive offerings built on Openstack will emerge and battle for primacy in the marketplace. The customer wins in this discussion. Choice is competition, and competition is betterment.

When I think about cloud and Openstack trends for 2015-16, the primary trend of note to me is the move away from hypervisors to a fusion between containers and bare metal.

7. Flexibility in networking connectivity

Cloud and network are co-dependent. A cloud implementation can’t be successful without reliable networking. However, network services should be fluid, like cloud services. Enterprises should be able to scale up and down network services to meet workload demand, usage and risk. The richness of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) stack, with multiple protocols and implementations of these protocols, requires this level of flexibility. Moreover, the ability to control these configurations requires the long promised value of network function virtualization (NFV) be recognized as a first class citizen in the cloud environment virtual stack.

8. Enterprises move to global cloud deployments

There are no local businesses today. IT needs to support enterprises globally so cloud and networking services need to span the globe—with data centres and connectivity that can service multi-national businesses and customers. Customers live around the globe. Suppliers work around the globe. Opportunities exist in 6 of the continents and in all the cultures on the globe.

Companies can ill afford to ignore the potential return on investment of cloud computing, but not every workload is suited to the public cloud. By carefully considering the five key topic areas outlined in this paper, organizations can develop strategies to ensure an effective hybrid cloud strategy—and reap the benefits of greater business agility and cost efficiency.