For some purpose I’m on the record of just about every PR firm with a consumer that desires to have its predictions for the future year listened to. Largely their guesses are clear and unhelpful, these kinds of as “cloud computing will go on to grow” or “cloud protection will go on to be a worry.” Persons are genuinely heading out on a limb.
Having said that, I see a handful of predictions more than and more than once again. I suspect that a lot of out there in the cloud computing market are beginning to imagine them, so I need to have to place out some realities that are usually overlooked or misunderstood.
The increase of multicloud to develop into “cloud agnostic” is the most common—and most concerning—prediction. I in particular get worried if the perceived benefit is that staying cloud agnostic refers to environments that are capable of operating with any community cloud provider with nominal disruptions to a business.
The idea looks powerful, contemplating that you can leverage greatest-of-breed community cloud computing solutions, these kinds of as deciding on storage from two or far more community cloud suppliers. However, the fact is that purposes and facts must be localized to a distinct cloud provider to be of real worth to the business. This indicates that you will have to lock in to a cloud provider to acquire real gain of that cloud provider’s capabilities.
So if you leverage multicloud, and at the same time endeavor to be cloud agnostic, you will have to acquire the the very least prevalent denominator solution to developing purposes and connecting facts storage. This indicates that you won’t be optimized for any community cloud system, or that you won’t operate properly any place.
I’ll also point out that you’re missing significant indigenous capabilities these kinds of as protection, governance, management and monitoring, and many others. If you do use these capabilities, that application and facts won’t be cloud agnostic given that they are no lengthier portable between community cloud platforms mainly because of the coupling of cloud solutions optimized for people platforms. No superior cloud architect will acquire this solution provided the damaging trade-offs. I push back on them weekly.
Of training course, rising systems these kinds of as containers and container orchestration engines do offer cross-cloud portability. The compromise here is that you will have to port your purposes and facts to containers, which provides value and possibility. But it’s an option.
A 2nd prediction fears the developing of “cloud-native” purposes. Simply put this indicates that you’ve refactored or goal-created purposes and facts storage to acquire gain of indigenous or proprietary capabilities of distinct community cloud platforms. The purposes have been coded to acquire gain of the indigenous solutions offered by a single community cloud provider, these kinds of as indigenous protection, indigenous management, or indigenous databases.
Cloud indigenous is a superior issue in that it will allow developer and architects to enhance purposes and facts storage making use of solutions for the cloud provider they operate on. You’re developing and deploying purposes that are almost a hundred p.c optimized, and consequently offer greater efficiency, protection, and reliability.
The selling price is community cloud provider lock-in. Port the purposes and facts to one more community cloud provider and you will need to have to do some big surgical treatment to make them cloud indigenous to the new provider, these kinds of as AWS or Google.
I never signify to be the designated buzzkill here. It’s just my reaction to the amount of misinformation out there appropriate now and the need to have to push back on some of it. I would fairly you go to multicloud or cloud indigenous with your eyes open, prepared to make some challenging options.
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