“Cloud is more synonymous to the internet than rain because the monsoon is only for 3 months” – claims my friend!
First time I heard of cloud in 2008 as I was working for a solution option using Salesforce. Little did I know that Amazon had already started a new business under AWS two years ago and Google had started venturing into the cloud in the same year.
Fast forward 2018, Salesforce has become the poster boy of Cloud platform; Amazon, Microsoft & cloud businesses growing more than 50% y-o-y, Google 150%+. (1)
Cloud has gone beyond the original definition from NIST (2) in terms of the characteristics, deployment models and service models. What fascinates me is the evolution of cloud from initial SaaS-centric application capability augmentation to IaaS-centric data center engineering to now PaaS-centric platform engineering. Promise of the cloud has evolved from cost optimization service for an enterprise to a true-blue partner in digital transformation.
If you are working on the cloud for some time, you know how enterprises have started following the trails of startups – how to squeeze the cloud capabilities to acquire business capabilities faster. For enterprises, it’s no more just few business applications in the cloud as a service (e.g. Salesforce, Office365, Service Now) or just low-cost on-demand infrastructure rented as a self-service or lifting and shifting the data center workload to the cloud. Thanks to digital – today’s enterprises are also trying to build an ecosystem of startup-like agile business capabilities for the enterprise – by making use of cloud platforms.
And the result? If Uber, Netflix, AirBnB are delivering new application features every 2-3 days, these enterprises are shortening their quarterly and monthly release cycles to weekly ones. What makes this a reality is exploiting the power of cloud platforms.
Today, with the speed and scale demanded from consumers, systems are becoming more as products of non-functional engineering rather than of structured functional design. We are concerned of dynamic scaling (think of Amazon prime sale, Cyber Monday), on-demand computing, stream processing (think of you getting message while looking into the shelf or browsing the site), distributed and parallel computing with of course transparent failover of applications from one zone to another (soon cloud deployment zones should have ZIP codes). Spotify, Netflix, Uber, Pandora – all of them made their innovations in non-functional engineering by optimizing the blocks of architecture. Large enterprises like GE and Philips are also not far behind. The common in all of them is that they have used platform services from the cloud to build/re-build some of their new business capabilities.
IDC says that about 60% of the applications are going to be delivered on cloud using platform services. Gartner is more aggressive – says that by 2020, 50% of all new applications will run in public cloud. Year 2017 saw about 50% growth in cloud containers (3) – one pillar in making use of cloud platform services and non-functional engineering a reality.
Making use of cloud platform services is THE new pattern of how we build and maintain solutions. Under Digital manifesto, it is no more building a large application with a large number of features built over a period. It is now about building a perpetual-beta solution as an aggregation of a set of small services built in parallel incrementally and building as fast as you can. These services are also built to support internet-scale, resilience, automation, change management, canary release, and multi-variate testing grounds-up. By employing the architectural paradigms like – microservices, container-based deployment, “serverless” platform services and reactive manifesto – Cloud is enabling all this.
As software is eating the world, Cloud not only remains the stomach and intestine digesting and assimilating the world of information but also processing the exhaust (and overdose) for a better insight on behalf of the software – what to eat the next day!
That’s the new promise of Cloud!
(1) – https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2018/02/02/1332405/0/en/Cloud-Growth-Rate-Increases-Amazon-Microsoft-Google-all-Gain-Market-Share.html
(2) – https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/sp/800-145/final
(3) – https://451research.com/blog/1351-application-containers-will-be-a-$2-7bn-market-by-2020,-representing-a-small-but-high-growth-segment-of-the-cloud-enabling-technologies-market