The most important cloud progress of the decade

The technology got a boost in the 2010s when companies started moving workloads from the site and cloud giants emerged.

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Cloud computing is perhaps the most transforming technology in recent years and has changed the nature of organizations. Although cloud took root for 2010, technology got a serious momentum in 2010, as evidenced by the number of offers and companies moving some workloads from the site to another location, followed by most or all of their companies.

More than a third of the organizations consider cloud investments a top three investment priority, which, according to Gartner, has an impact on market supply. The company also predicted that by the end of 2019, more than 30% of new technology investments from technology providers will shift from cloud-first to cloud-only.

Here are some of the most striking developments in the cloud of the past decade.

SEE: Cloud providers 2019: a buyer’s guide (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

Cloud giants are born

By 2010, the three cloud giants – Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google – had all launched their cloud activities. It was also the year in which OpenStack was established, the leading open-source cloud software platform. Global spending on public cloud started the decade at $ 77 billion, according to Statista, and was expected to be rounded off to $ 411 billion – more than five times that amount.

AWS cloud formation public edition

Realizing the scalability and elasticity of cloud services requires that cloud environments are defined by code. AWS CloudFormation, launched in 2011, provided a supported, consistent way to define AWS cloud implementations in environments of all sizes, notes Brian Alletto, a senior architect at digital consulting firm at West Monroe Partners.

“This provided an important building block of infrastructure as a code within the AWS ecosystem and facilitated the rapid expansion of pre-built solutions that are” ready-made “available for any AWS manager,” Alletto said.

The rise of serverless computing

The serverless model is one in which functions are usually performed in the cloud. For all purposes, server-free computing was essentially born at the 2014 AWS Reinvent Conference with the announcement of Amazon Web Services by Lambda. Microsoft and Google soon followed with their own platforms.

Despite the name, serverless computing does not eliminate the need for a server. Instead, the software code is outsourced to the cloud provider’s infrastructure, where the application is automatically scaled based on the request. The cloud provider maintains the server and manages the resource allocation to allow the required resources to burst and contract elastically. The price is based on the amount of resources used and not on previously purchased capacity units.

SEE: Serverless architectures: 10 serious security problems (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

Containers and micro services

Containers, with which developers can manage software code and migrate easily, have become hugely popular. Docker was released in 2013, but it was the first release of Kubernetes in 2014 that, according to Alletto, really got the ball rolling. That “started with the wide acceptance of container-based architectures by corporate IT stores and the required standardization of container-based solutions with all major public cloud providers,” he said.

451 Research predicted that the market for application containers would grow from $ 749 million in 2016 to more than $ 3.4 billion in 2021. Fifty-three percent of organizations research or use containers in development or production, according to a Cloud Foundry report.

The use of cloud containers has become the new standard because they enable workload portability, said Kishore Durg, senior managing director of Accenture Cloud for Technology Services. “So you can take something that is written in one place with you everywhere. That’s huge.”

Containers have produced microservices, DevOps, hybrid / multicloud scenarios and application modernization and migration, Durg said. Running apps on smaller services lowers costs and ensures higher use and more efficient use of resources. Containers also gives companies the opportunity to accelerate the development of newer technologies for competitive advantage, he said.

Native cloud services

According to Durg, one of the most important cloud computing events of the decade is the emergence of native cloud services. “It changes people’s perception of the cloud – from being seen as a cheaper data center to a real innovation system.”

Native cloud services give companies almost instant access to services that would take months for companies to develop on location, he noted.

In 2018, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), a vendor-neutral home for cloud-native projects, had an end-user community of more than 50 members, including powerhouses like all major cloud providers, as well as companies such as AT&T, NEC, Accenture, and Bloomberg.

“Native cloud services are demonstrably what the era of agile development has ushered in the enterprise,” said Durg.

Connectivity with the cloud

Initially, companies created “confused VPN connections,” said George Burns III, senior consultant of cloud consulting activities, SPR. Dedicated connections with Amazon Direct Connect started in 2011 and Azure Express Route in 2014, among others. Now connectivity is “so well commoditized that almost any company can connect its existing infrastructure to the cloud,” Burns said.

The use of virtual private clouds has also increased over the last decade, with part of the public cloud being portioned for private use, and VPNs to access clouds, said David Linthicum, chief cloud strategy officer at Deloitte Consulting. “Now they can have a VPC that uses a virtual private-public network,” he said. That was a major change and was not expected to happen, and suddenly, all the objections people had about which public cloud is dropping. “

Explosion of SaaS

Traction for software as a service began in the early 2000s, but it wasn’t until the end of 2016-early 2017 when SaaS left the boot room and people started using it in the business space, said Sid Nag, research president at Gartner. According to Gartner, the global market for public cloud services will grow by 17.5% in 2019 to $ 214.3 billion, an increase of $ 182.4 billion in 2018.

The fastest growing market segment is cloud system infrastructure services or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), which is predicted to grow 27.5 percent in 2019 to $ 38.9 billion, an increase of $ 30.5 billion in 2018. The second largest highest growth rate of 21.8 percent is achieved by cloud application infrastructure services or platform as a service (PaaS).

According to Linthicum, one of the important trends in SaaS is access to service level APIs. “I can retrieve something from my app behind the scenes without the need for a user interface,” he said.

“Cloud services absolutely confuse the industry,” Nag said. The growth of SaaS surpasses the growth of on-premise, license-based software, he added.

Growth of hybrid cloud

Hybrid clouds, the combination of private, on-premise clouds with public clouds, have been enormously launched in recent years as a way for organizations to cover their bets and balance what they do internally while balancing their toes. cross the public cloud.

“People are moving to hybrid cloud to eventually move to the public or multicloud,” Linthicum said. “They like hybrid because it means” I’m in favor of everything, “and then it essentially doesn’t paint them into a corner or throws the hackles of people in the organization, even five years ago, that only push back the public cloud. “

He said that 95% of the hybrid clouds being built combines existing mainframe systems that are connected to one of the major cloud providers. Gartner estimates that by 2021, 90% of organizations will use multiclouds or a hybrid (public-private) cloud model.

SEE: Top five on-premises cloud storage options (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

Backup and restore

Organizations started backing up workloads to the cloud around 2014, but that was mainly for testing, Burns said. It was really the following year “when we pushed workloads to the public cloud . as soon as we had websites, we started pushing our backup files to Amazon S3.”

In 2015, Rackspace, traditionally a provider of hosting and managed services, announced a major strategic shift to managed services from cloud providers, Alletto said. “This announcement both validated the business models of newer, cloud-only competitors, while indicating the availability of large-scale managed services for the public cloud environments of corporate IT stores.”

Now business continuity and disaster recovery is “ingrained in everything we do,” Burns adds. “The ability to purchase granular resources allows us to think about disaster recovery after step 1 and not after launch into production.”

Linthicum agreed and said, “Suddenly people started concentrating on BCDR (business continuity and disaster recovery) in the last three years.” The assumption was that if organizations were to use cloud, they would automatically be resilient, but in the past three years, backup solutions began to bend with the arrival of AWS Glacier, he said. “People realize that they are still responsible for backing up their data.”

Switch from capex to opex

One of the biggest trends in the cloud was the change in the way organizations purchased technology resources. Around 2016, there was a realization that they could save significant amounts of money on hardware and data centers, and purchase services instead if needed.

Linthicum puts the timeframe a bit further back and said that companies started to value flexibility and time-to-market as value identifications. “Normally we can save 20 to 30% on operational costs by switching to the as-a-service model,” he said. “I used to say,” People come to the cloud for cost savings and they stay agile. “”

Cloud consolidation

In 2018, according to Gartner, the top five IaaS providers (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM and Alibaba) accounted for nearly 77% of the global IaaS market. The company also predicts that the number of cloud service providers will be consolidated from 3,000 to around 1,500 between 2020-2023, Nag said.

“It’s clear that smaller players are being pushed out of the company,” he noted. This is due to the fact that access to the cloud business requires a significant investment. “Offering IaaS requires building data centers and significant investment, and if you don’t,” Deep pockets make it difficult to support this business. ”

Consolidation is the final state of every technological trend we’ve had in the past and cloud is no different, Linthicum said. “Ultimately, people . will spend the most resources that will generate the most value. Buy-in for cloud computing is so high that the larger providers that are in control and consolidation will take place.”

An abundance of startups and disruptors in the cloud

The rise of born-in-the-cloud companies has increased over the last decade. From video streaming to ride sharing services, these companies were able to move faster and cheaper than when they started their business 15 years ago, Linthicum noted, all thanks to cloud computing.

“They’ve used cloud as a power multiplier as a weapon for their business,” he said. “I have sat on many panels . where (startups) were asked what the only technology was that allowed them to be as successful as they are when they are put in a corner, they would say cloud computing.”

Cloud Management

The move to the cloud also became more acceptable to organizations in highly regulated sectors due to the emergence of cloud governance, which ensures consistent policy enforcement “and a cloud security framework that dictates the security obligations of a cloud computing provider and its users to guarantee responsibility “” according to TechTarget.

Most people struggle with complexity issues when moving to the cloud, “and the only way to get around this is governance . because it’s almost an untenable problem if we don’t have governance over the costs, services and resources that we manage,” said Linthicum.

“It’s 80% of the questions I answer,” in terms of how cloud governance works. Governance has been around since the advent of cloud computing, he noted, “but now we are just discovering it.” Public cloud providers usually do not sell this feature, he added; they are mainly third parties because the solutions are heterogeneous and work across multiple clouds.

Growth of multiclouds

A Gartner survey among public cloud users earlier this year points to a major shift towards a multicloud computing strategy. The survey results show that 81% of the respondents work with two or more providers.

“Most organizations use a multicloud strategy based on a desire to prevent supplier locking or to take advantage of the best solutions,” said Michael Warrilow, vice president at Gartner.

This is also reinforced by the trend of migration to the cloud in a simple “lift and shift” approach, which moves data with as little work as possible, Linthicum said, usually by re-editing or redoing the applications and data to make them work more efficiently on a cloud-based platform.

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