Where Cloud Is Heading?

Multi-node clustered servers to quickly provisioned small virtual infrastructure maintained as code. Tightly coupled massive monolith to microservices called as API service. Resources distributed over geography, content cached locally and accessed over a shared semi-private or public network. Different organizations collaborating to provide end service. Cloud practice has come a long way to provide anything as service. The global cloud computing market is growing very fast and is estimated to cross $1 trillion revenue by 2027. 

There seems to be a place for every workload in cloud now. Cloud is best place to look for quick temporary resources at a low cost. Big business houses have their own private network and prefer to keep some very crucial and confidential data behind firewall in their own data centre, but business is typically grown over lower cost and increased agility to drive efficiency. Innovations in the areas like IOT and AI is flourishing fast with cloud's capacity on demand. Naturally, we are seeing rush to be on cloud. With that rush, new challenges and threats are posing every day and so are new features to mitigate or safeguard against them. IT Operations are still adapting to the new evolving landscape. 

Cloud was a big disruption to the IT services industry. While sorting providers, decision making concern progressed over different features offered by different vendors, cost savings, security concerns, vendor lock-in concerns. With the constant effort to provide all options and features available elsewhere, soon cloud playground will be level. When that happens, cloud infrastructure and platform will be like a utility, almost the same way a telephone network behaves today. We see a second trend over the path of collaboration where providers become open and compatible with each other. As third trend, a group of specialized and innovative services flourishing with any-cloud as their backend. Similarly, many old software evolving up in new cloud agnostic SaaS or PaaS avatar. 

Cloud infrastructure and platform surely be the backbone for many future applications and services. We shall see cloud to do the heavy lifting while the application world takes the next leap. Cloud vendors will probably be trying best to keep their unique identity through service that is not available elsewhere. Possibly there will be new technologies coming up with their own cloud enabled, cloud agnostic services as well. Maybe it is just too early to understand the future dynamics, but I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this.