By Kathy Gibson – The world of cloud computing is continuously evolving, and today the technology is embedded in just about every application and system we work with.
Just a few short years ago, you couldn’t talks about IT without cloud dominating the conversation, with customers and partners alike pondering how they would shift their businesses to accommodate the technology.
Today, cloud has matured, and is now simply a flavour of the things we do every day, says Dion Harvey, GM: sub-Saharan Africa region of Red Hat.
“Now, some of the early mistakes we made in cloud have become lessons in how we can deal with technology disruption,” he says.
“I think artificial intelligence (AI) is morphing in the same direction and we will soon see it infused into everything.”
Now that cloud has become pervasive, get ready for Cloud 2.0, where AI takes what’s possible to the next level.
Eugene de Sousa, regional cloud lead: sub-Saharan Africa at Red Hat, says cloud already allows even small, local companies to compete with any company, anywhere in the world.
“There are a lot of profound statistics that show us cloud has come of age.”
Today, AWS is almost a $100-billion annual run rate business, while Azure and Google Cloud have both seen close to 30% revenue increases.
“AI is among the key drivers for this growth,” De Sousa says.
Generative AI (GenAI) has caught the popular imagination, with its ability run massive analysis on large language models (LLMs) – but this requires a huge amount of processing power, De Sousa explains.
“It’s simply too expensive for regular organisations to train their own models. “It’s easier and more cost-effective to rent from the cloud providers.”
He points out that the cloud hyperscalers are fuelling up to 50% of Nvidia’s revenues.
“For the hyperscalers, the value proposition is that for every $1 they spend on compute and networking, they will get back $5 in the next four years,” De Sousa says. “And that is what will fuel the next stock price rally.”
We are on the verge of a new cloud era, De Sousa believes. “We are still on the runway for AI, but soon cloud and AI will become synonymous.”
And, as companies learn how to get the most out of their IT investment with hybrid cloud strategies, they will take these learning to the AI world, he says.
“Customers are evaluating solutions now, looking at the flexibility, scalability and cost-effectiveness of various solutions from turnkey to managed service with robust support, from cloud-native joint solutions to vendor-agnostic.
“One of Red Hat’s strongest value propositions is that we are cloud-agnostics: if you build with Red Hat, you can use your application wherever you want to.”
But De Sousa says cloud has become pervasive and within the next year or so it will be the platform of choice for more than half of all workloads. “By 2027 it will be almost irreversible, with cloud spend far surpassing non-cloud spend.
“In this scenario, it is important for customers to understand where to invest in skills.”
The AI tech cycle will more than likely mirror the cloud cycle, De Sousa adds, and organisations will soon have to deal with a multi-AI, hybrid-AI environment.
Bruce Busansky, app platform specialist: sub-Saharan Africa at Red Hat, believes the central issue when it comes to technology is that it simplifies our lives and helps up to keep on moving forward.
“Whether it’s AI, cloud services or both, the important thing is that we can help the customer simplify what they have today.”
The only difference between new technology innovations today and in years past is that they are coming at us faster now, he adds.
“But from a Red Hat perspective, we want to help our customers simplify architectures – and cloud services can help with this. Once they are simplified, we can standardise platforms and processes.”
By hybridising workloads – making it possible to run on either cloud or on-premise – customers effectively gain a single solution that runs wherever it makes sense. This will help them to free up cycles, and simplify their environment.
“We can remove complexity by adopting a single platform,” Busansky explains. “Our goal has always been, as a platform business, to create a standard operating platform for bare metal, virtual machine, private cloud public cloud or the edge.”
This architecture has helped Red Hat to elevate solutions like virtual machines (VMs), containerisation, AI and machine learning (ML) and, in turn, the new hardware like GPUs and neural processes.
“Basically, our customers want to run applications that make their businesses work,” Busansky says. “So services run above the common layer, helping customers to build faster applications that are cloud native and harness the power of the data. Because now data is the thing that is driving AI.”
By moving cloud services to the top of the stack, customers can consume most of the stack as a managed service, which helps them to free up scarce skills.
Red Hat’s OpenShift Cloud Services offering lets customers use what they already have, and frees their people up to perform more meaningful tasks. “The less customers have to focus on basic operations, and the more they can spend on high level stuff, the better,” Busansky says.
OpenShift has helped 46% of customers achieve a return on investment (ROI) within three years; 50% report enhancements in operational efficiency; 65% say application development time was accelerated; and 70% saw a reduction in development cycle time.
De Sousa explains that Red Hat OpenShift is standard application platform that can work anywhere with a consistent user experience.
“Customers can also outsource the management of the infrastructure and platform, leaving them free to develop applications at speed.
“And the services are modular, so you can swop out or plug in your own tools.”
Importantly, Red Hat OpenShift cloud services available across all clouds. “This allows customers to accelerate time to value and gain operational efficiency, so they can focus on innovation.
Red Hat now provides Red Hat OpenShift AI and OpenShift Virtualisation on top of Red Hat OpenShift.