Cloud is now a de facto way of creating technology infrastructure and services. It has entirely upended how traditional technology procurement works and has brought more relevance to business conversations. With this in mind, what are the trends that currently define cloud and will do so in the future?
By Tony Bartlett, director: data centre compute at Dell Technologies South Africa
The most important is perhaps multi-cloud. This is distinct from hybrid cloud. Hybrid cloud is a combination of a public and private cloud or on-premise systems.
Multi-cloud is the ability to shift workloads and data between different cloud providers, and plug the services of various cloud providers into one system. Multi-cloud avoids lock-in dangers and also helps companies with heavy workloads to shift around and find the best prices.
But it does create challenges, specifically the difficulty of managing such varied environments. This is why top vendors such as Dell Technologies have been driving the adoption of proper cloud real-estate management.
The second trend of significant importance is HCI or hyper-converged infrastructure.
HCI is cloud-in-a-box, at least for the hardware and operation layers. An HCI combines the right hardware with software-defined elements for storage, networking, compute and virtual environments created by hypervisors. They are preconfigured to get customers as close as possible to a plug-and-play cloud setup.
HCI is important because cloud customers don’t only care about services.
Many need their own cloud presences, be it at a remote site or co-located in a major datacentre. But nobody wants to go back to the expensive and wasteful procurement habits of the past – cloud is meant to take all that away.
HCI solves this problem by following the cloud mantra of ready services and easy deployment while giving customers the hardware power without the headaches or future performance guesswork.
HCI varies from large systems to small ones, and facilitates the expansion of cloud services across more parts of an organisation, such as remote sites or branches.
The third trend worth noting is the rise of the cloud edge. This is still a nascent part of the cloud world, especially since there isn’t consensus yet on what the edge is and could be.
The edge exists where a part of a cloud is deployed at a remote site, such as a warehouse, factory or retail branch. Though the edge doesn’t replicate the heavy work of the massive and elastically-resourced central cloud, it can handle more mundane tasks to speed up performance. For example, if you keep piping raw data to central servers, it will take a lot of time. But if that data is sorted at the edge and only the necessary amount sent along, it’s much more efficient.
Edge’s use-case is being spurred by IoT, which generates a lot of data which needs cleaning and sorting.
There are also other use cases for edge, such as client-side AI (for example, localising the virtual assistant on your phone). At this stage, edge strategies vary.
Some are excited about the potential for serverless computing and cloudless-edge.
Others look to the power of high-speed networking such as fibre and 5G to close the gap.
But edge will be a key technology in future cloud strategies.
Finally, serverless computing requires a mention. This may be the most dramatic contribution cloud has made to date. Every major technology service needs a server, but the customer doesn’t.
This is currently addressed by letting users request and consume resources from the cloud through virtual servers, which they can scale up and down as demand changes.
Serverless computing pushes that allocation layer a step back and into the control of the cloud platform.
In this scenario, the application and workload’s demands are not met with predetermined allocations but shift dynamically. Demand scales as and when it’s needed.
This approach is a significant shift in terms of cost, as well as how cloud-native applications can be designed.
One last honourable mention: containers are very popular and growing even moreso because they help transfer an application to different cloud environments without rocking the boat.
A container is a womb for an application, feeding it everything it needs but sheltering it from the different conditions of the outside cloud world. Containers are not a future trend, but they illustrate the decentralised, agnostic paths that are opening in the cloud world.