Over the past several years, the popularity of Internet, standardization of technology, and emergence of web services have caused cloud-computing services to significantly evolve. What was previously somewhat limited due to diseconomies of scale, the rapid adoption of cloud has caused additional services to emerge at significantly lower costs. And as businesses continue to migrate more of their critical operational components to the cloud, these services will continue to become a mainstay within the IT industry.
A decade of cloud services evolution has resulted in 3 broad tiers of services, stacked as below:
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Virtualized computing instances like AWS EC2 and compute/storage components e.g. AWS SQS queuing service or Google BigQuery data analytics service.
- Platform as a Service (PaaS): Services to develop, deploy, run and manage cloud applications e.g. AWS Beanstalk, Cloud Foundry
- Software as a Service (SaaS): The user visible frontend or business layer of cloud applications e.g. 3CLogic call center service or Salesforce.
The future evolution of cloud services will see enrichment of these three layers, as well as defining of sub-layers and addition of layers adjacent to or stacked on top on them. But what exactly are these emerging trends and “layers”, and what can one expect to see in the future of cloud 2.0?
Check-out the following 4 trends shaping the future of cloud:
1) Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) and other sub-layers will emerge: Backend-as-a-service or BaaS is already a concept that has begun taking shape. These services attempt to package common features for a class of applications as a unified set of APIs. Mobile BaaS are leading the front, with features like user management, backend storage, push notifications, social media integration etc., combined as BaaS. Look forward to several (X)aaS joining the party.
2) Iaas will become more flexible: IaaS virtualized computing will have to evolve from pre-defined fixed size compute instances to more flexible user defined instances where memory and processing cores can be defined as per app requirements and charged accordingly. Vertical scaling of an application by adding more memory or cores to the instances will run alongside horizontal scaling, which adds compute instances for an application. In addition, new and richer IaaS components are rapidly being introduced by cloud vendors. With competition heating up, expect to see improving components with falling prices coming your way. From messaging queues, notification services etc. to maintenance free data stores (RDBMS, NoSql, in-memory) and scalable analytics.
3) PaaS will continue to evolve towards a hybrid model: PaaS in increasingly evolving towards a hybrid cloud model, thanks to several commercial and open source initiatives. Application developers will get tools to develop and deploy their offerings, over a mix of multiple cloud vendors and private cloud. Also, with the applications moving towards micro-services architectures, containerized applications (Dockers) will become the development and deployment units. PaaS services like Google Kubernetes and Nginx+ are taking shape for container management and deployment.
4) SaaS vendors’ costs will continue to decrease: SaaS vendors and application developers are in for a grand party, thanks to the aforementioned evolutionary move to cloud 2.0. Distributed applications like 3CLogic and continued march of mobile applications will leverage the cost and operational efficiencies, unleashed by the brave new world of cloud 2.0.
