How do you see cloud programs evolving in the near future?
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Everything will continue to go cloud native and as a result the cloud will continue to grow. What hopefully starts to happen is more tools will continue to be developed that make the management of the cloud platforms easier to manage.
With the number of services available in the cloud increasing constantly, the ability to manage all these services and the resulting more complex architectures, there will be an increased need to manage these at scale for more organisations and provide more high-level visibility. I foresee smarter and more automated ways to handle these scenarios growing in demand.
The volume of cloud programs is going to grow dramatically, and with that the need for automated sizing, backups, auth, monitoring, etc. I see cloud programs being much easier to bring online because of the advent of these automated supporting infrastructure pieces that are necessary for security and availability.
I think the cloud applications will become more secure, with passwordless or biometric login, by default protected via WAF. It will be easy to support multi-cloud scenarios, either by being able to move the app instances between major players (AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle) but also they will be more and more supported in private cloud or infrastructure as a service solutions.
The cloud today has disrupted the traditional data centre model and has moved IT from datacenters-"captive in enterprises" to datacenters-"captive in the cloud". The natural life cycle of evolution will be from a scale-phase with more differentiated features, to a commodity phase, and to a phase where something more powerful disrupts it. Captivity in the cloud will evolve to its natural state of moderation.
Certainly, cloud technology has delivered on key advantages such as IT cost, scale, pay-as-you-go, select-as-per-need, reconfigure on demand, better availability, geo-distribution, flexibility to operate on infrastructure or operate as software as a service, etc.
However, the cloud has not yet unlocked the facilitation of the "power of monetizing assets" for users. As a user, I consume electricity from the grid, and I can also generate and sell electricity to the grid, true to the "IT as a utility model". Cloud computing will eventually define IT as a service grid. Certainly, that transformation is a little far away.
In an early evolutionary phase, the trajectory will be more organic. We will see more features in infrastructure as a service, such as different computing paradigms, overlay networks, storage capabilities, SLA-based configurations, more streamlined DevOps, ai-ops, automation of development processes, etc. Cloud vendors will apply AI technology to give more power to services. Cloud vendors will convert their services to microservices-based architecture.The non-cloud vendors offering infrastructure products will add a cloud layer and compete or partner with the leading cloud vendors.
In the mid-to long term, these trends will drive some disruptive innovation and the evolution of the cloud. Some of the trends are edge computing, IOT, edge security, abilities as a service, 5G, on-premise, distributed ledger and control, virtual IoT devices, IoT networks, specialised VMs, etc. An imperative model for services will evolve.
In a longer period, based on free-market traction, key cloud vendors will rationalise their services based on a) commodities where market-based innovation will help them succeed; and b) specialised services where innovation will be specific to use cases and differentiation will be based on features, thus demanding premium prices.
The platform for trading such capabilities of vendors will evolve and will be available for cloud vendors and suppliers to choose and construct a supply chain for value-added IT services for the cloud. The vendors will be able to purchase services from the cloud and deliver services by adding values, thus enabling B2B2C models. Monopolistic and restrictive practises of large cloud vendors may stymie such a free-market value unlocking.