The hybrid cloud market continues to grow. Five predictions for 2018
According to relevant forecasts, few companies have enjoyed the expected benefits of cloud computing centered on private infrastructure, but have renewed their focus on developer authorization: entering the cloud, a large number of new technology stacks will stimulate interest in new private clouds and carry out relevant experiments.
Data can support this prediction. IDC, a research company, estimates that the traditional data center accounts for 62% of IT infrastructure expenditure this year, of which 23% is for public clouds and 15% is for private clouds. By 2020, the proportion of data centers will drop to about 50%, with public cloud accounting for one third of the market and private cloud accounting for 20%. That is to say, data centers will become less important, while public cloud and private cloud will become more and more important.
Therefore, with the continued growth of private cloud and hybrid cloud, what will be the market situation in 2018 and beyond?
1、 Hybrid cloud strategy becomes clearer
All major IaaS public cloud providers clarified their hybrid cloud strategies in 2017, and set 2018 as the year of strategy adoption.
Perhaps the biggest effort in this field comes from Microsoft. After more than two years of market promotion, it finally released Azure Stack, a private cloud IaaS platform, aiming to look like Azure public cloud. The early deployment of Azure Stack has entered the market.
At the same time, Amazon Amazon Cloud Service AWS cooperates with the virtualization giants in Silicon Valley, and provides VMware on AWS hybrid cloud products. Google Cloud Platform cooperates with VMware and Nutanix. Both Oracle and IBM have their own internal hybrid cloud products.
With the launch of these products, 2018 will be a year to evaluate their progress and best use cases.
2、 Compete for private cloud
As enterprises move their workloads to the public cloud, they are now gaining valuable knowledge about the best use of the public cloud. Scott Crenshaw, Executive Vice President of Rackspace, said that many customers want to access infrastructure and application development resources similar to the cloud. He believes that platforms such as VMware, Microsoft Azure Stack, OpenStack, and other platforms of manufacturers such as Red Hat and Hewlett Packard Enterprise will continue to grow in 2018, because enterprises can find a reasonable combination of public and private clouds. He pointed out that "the economic value of private cloud will become more and more obvious, which will lead to large-scale migration of enterprises to these mixed environments."
3、 Container and PaaS as hybrid cloud platform
The general trend driving the whole cloud computing market is enabling application developers to innovate and create new business value as soon as possible. Maria Azua Himmel, Senior Vice President of Fidelity Distributed System, said that in doing so, it is not necessary to promise to adopt any infrastructure platform, but to use both private cloud and public cloud. She said: "Any company using cloud platforms will eventually use a variety of different tools and platforms." How does Fidelity manage the mixed environment? One key is to use containers to ensure that applications can run in any infrastructure environment. Fidelity uses a combination of PaaS and automation tools, such as Terraforms, Jenkins, Docker and Artifactory. As organizations continue to container their applications and optimize their application development processes, container business processes and management will be integrated into private and hybrid clouds.
4、 Optimize cloud connectivity
Azua pointed out that few organizations will use private cloud or public cloud alone, but actually each organization has its own workload. Any substantial use of hybrid clouds can benefit from an optimized network connected to the cloud. The Internet vendor market has expanded rapidly in recent years to support this. Equinix, Digital Realty, QTS and other companies can provide hosting and hosting services directly connected to public clouds (including AWS, Microsoft, Google and many other companies). As hybrid cloud computing will become the norm after 2018, establishing, managing and optimizing these connections will become a top priority.
5、 Local public cloud service
In 2015, Amazon Cloud Computing Service AWS announced the launch of the stateless event driven computing service Lambda, which is a serverless platform and the first event driven computing structure. 2018 may be the year when serverless computing is transferred from the public cloud to the local data center. Microsoft, Red Hat and other companies are trying to create serverless functions in local and hybrid cloud environments. For example, Red Hat has adopted OpenWhisk, an open source FaaS developed by IBM, and Microsoft has its own functional platform, which can bring this natural cloud technology to the local.
Another noteworthy thing that may be integrated into private and hybrid clouds is machine learning. Public cloud providers look a bit like machine learning and artificial intelligence platforms in the arms race to some extent, and customers can integrate them into their application development processes. It is expected that 2018 will be a year for private cloud and hybrid cloud providers to talk about how to introduce machine learning and AI functions in these environments.
