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CLOUD COMPUTING
Changing shapes on a cloudy day
By Richard Slater , Principal Consultant , Amido
www . amido . com
Predictions for how commoditisation through cloud computing will shape cloud services across all industries
The commoditisation of IT started with the cloud . With commoditisation comes standardisation , which allows for inexpensive products to work well together in the cloud ecosystem and that can be delivered at scale . It also opens the door to technologies like blockchain to enable distributed trust . These are the significant cloud growth areas we anticipate over the next 18 months :
Event-driven computing Serverless / FaaS1 is a hot topic in the world of software architecture , but we have to remember that cloud computing enabled the creation of Infrastructure as a Service ( IaaS ). IaaS enabled the creation of Platform as a Service ( PaaS ), and PaaS , in turn , enabled the creation of Software as a Service ( SaaS ) and the emerging Functions as a Service ( FaaS ) or Back end as a Service ( BaaS ). This is most commonly referred to as Serverless computing . With the launch of AWS Lambda in 2014 , the term started to attract more attention from outside the developer community . FaaS is a commoditised function of cloud computing , and one that takes away wasted compute associated with idle server storage and infrastructure .
The significance of FaaS for businesses could be huge , as they will no longer have to pay for the redundant use of servers . Instead , just for how much computing power that application consumes per millisecond , much like the per-second billing approach containers are moving towards . Instead of having an application on a server , the business can run it directly from the cloud allowing it to choose when to use and pay for it , per task – thus making it event-driven . According to Gartner , by 2020 , event-sourced , real-time situational awareness will be a required characteristic for 80 % of digital business solutions , and 80 % of new business ecosystems will require support for event processing .
However , not every business is going to be right for FaaS or serverless despite there being a real appetite in the industry to reduce the cost of adopting the cloud . Businesses considering FaaS as an option must realise that this is the ultimate in vendor lock-in , as it ’ s not easy to move services from one cloud to another . Each cloud provider approaches FaaS in a different way and at present functions cannot be moved between vendors .
As the demand for serverless technologies grows , the nature of DevOps will change ; we may be moving into a world of NoOps , where applications run themselves in the cloud with no infrastructure and little human involvement . Indeed , humans will need to be there to help automate those services , but they won ’ t be required to do as much coding or testing as they do now . With the advent of AI , the IoT , and other technologies , business events can be detected
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