Did Last Year’s Cloud Predictions Pan Out?

Before we dive into our annual cloud predictions, we here at Data Center Knowledge are going to look back on 2014 to see if last year’s cloud predictions panned out. A lot happened in 2014; too much to cover everything. So, let’s paint the year in cloud using wide brushstrokes.

Application Containers

Credit to Rackspace CTO John Engates, who was a fervent and optimistic proponent of containers this time last year. Containers provide an easy way to spin applications up and down on any type of infrastructure, and they have definitely commanded the cloud world’s attention this year.

Docker released its first commercial product this month. Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure added support and services for Docker containers. Docker was integrated with Windows Server, and virtualization giant VMware added container support to VMware infrastructure. IBM, Microsoft, and Red Hat joined Google’s open source container project. Rackspace added native Docker support.

Several startups providing services around Docker raised money.

In summary, the startups and the giants have embraced containers. Much of the container technology is open source, which leads us to the second prediction from last year.

Open Source: from Alternative to Prime Time

The days of looking to a specific vendor for a complete roadmap are now in a death rattle. Innovation in cloud is spearheaded by open source.

DevOps partly drives this trend. As the developer’s role in technology infrastructure decisions grew, so did the use of open source. A recent survey found that nearly everyone is planning to employ DevOps, and cloud providers like Cisco’s Metacloud noted not only increasing Dev team involvement in decisions, but increasing success with private cloud when Dev teams were involved.

A handful of giants opened up big time. Microsoft open sourced the entire .NET framework, IBM opened its POWER server architecture, taking the trend all the way down to server firmware. The OpenPOWER Foundation recently added Rackspace to a growing consortium.

In Platform-as-a-Service, the Cloud Foundry Foundation launched. The open source PaaS project used to be run solely by VMware-controlled Pivotal, but the software company decided Cloud Foundry would grow much faster as an independently governed endeavor.

Open source is also driving the big data cloud.

OpenStack, the open source cloud architecture, saw incredible growth and participation, even among enterprises and the largest tech companies. IBM fully endorsed OpenStack across its entire cloud portfolio this week, and HP has become one of the top contributors to the project.

Popular open source technologies like Docker, Kubernetes, Apache Mesos Apache Spark and etcd formed the foundations of hottest tech startups. Everybody needs to play nice in the cloud world, and open source is the way vendor ecosystems are hooking up.

From Public or Private to Public AND Private

Both private and public cloud models are taking root. While many new companies are born in the cloud, medium-to-large enterprises continue to employ a hybrid strategy.

Hybrid is shaping IBM’s cloud strategy. Big partnerships like Microsoft and Accenture were formed to address hybrid cloud needs. Data center providers like Equinix see hybrid cloud needs driving colocation sales.

It was the most popular trend in a recent survey from 2nd Watch

Cloud: Birthplace of Value-Added Services

Pricing wars among cloud giants led many to believe that cloud’s influence would turn compute and storage into a cheap commodity. While there has been a race to the bottom, the most successful companies this year tuned offerings to provide value beyond raw cloud infrastructure.

In conjunction with the emergence of the hybrid model came a need to outsource management and operations to further optimize infrastructures. Raw compute is available if you need it, but the picture for many is more complex. The growth of private cloud means many are looking to leverage operational flexibility of cloud but in a contained, managed way.

CenturyLink and Internap both are offering a wide variety of cloud and services, adding value above and beyond raw cloud as part of the strategy.

Cloud storage providers are acquiring capabilities to combat commoditization of cloud storage, adding value to businesses in particular.