Cloud Computing Trends for 2021
Published on : Wednesday 06-01-2021
Various innovations would happen in cloud computing to help organisations modernise existing applications and build new cloud native solutions, says Navveen Balani.
Cloud computing kept the business and remote workforces connected during this ongoing coronavirus pandemic. As we move into 2021, every organisation would eventually adopt cloud models and existing cloud businesses would look at ways to streamline their processes for better business continuity.
Let’s look at the top cloud computing trends that organisations need to watch out for.
Hybrid and multicloud
A hybrid and multicloud platform provides a cloud computing environment that helps organisations to deploy and manage their applications on on-prem, private cloud or across multi-cloud providers in a unified and consistent way.
A multicloud environment provides enterprises to modernise their applications and adopt cloud services from multiple cloud vendors based on their business requirements and avoid vendor lock-in.
Organisations which run their solutions on-premises, can leverage their existing infrastructure and modernise their applications and build regulatory and compliant solutions where data doesn’t leave the organisation’s geographic boundaries. These organisations can scale their on-prem infrastructure to cloud and also leverage cloud services to run non-sensitive computation tasks. For instance, hybrid and multicloud platforms like Google Anthos, provide a unified approach to streamline on-premises and multi cloud environments that include:
- A consistent development and deployment experience
- Unified operations, monitoring and SLA management
- Consistent compliance, security and policy adherence
- Portability through the use of cloud-native applications/containers.
You would see a lot of developments in this space – from infrastructure modernisation, integration, tooling and skilling for hybrid and multi-cloud adoption.
Cloud on the Edge
In a connected world and with 5G gaining momentum, we would see new class of cloud-native applications that would require data and compute to be located closer to end-users to provide real-time, ultra-low latency and immersive experience.
The next generation applications would drive a new set of requirements like near real-time decision making, low latency streaming, gaming and virtual experience and collective intelligence. With adoption of the Internet of Things, every object in the world would have the potential to connect to the Internet and provide their data so as to derive actionable insights on its own or through other connected objects. To realise this vision for the Internet of Things, Edge computing would play a very critical role.
Industries need to be agile and prepared for transformation. For instance virtual mall shopping, trying and buying stuff can provide the same real-like experience in future.
Cloud providers would need to extend the hybrid and multi-cloud model on the edge to provide computing and central management of edge clouds.
Serverless
Serverless technology removes the overhead of managing the cloud infrastructure and allows organisations to focus on executing business functions.
Lot of organisations have already embarked on the serverless journey and this would grow exponentially for new classes of applications and for distributed services orchestration. Serverless technology will be a boon for start-ups and small scale businesses to quickly try out and scale ideas/products without worrying about constant cloud costs.
You might see a lot of standardisation evolve in this arena, which allows to run serverless technology in a vendor neutral way across hybrid and multi-cloud providers.
Intelligent cloud management and cloud optimisation
As all workloads would eventually move to cloud and hybrid cloud models, intelligent cloud management solutions would evolve which would guide customers to use cloud services effectively and optimise their spends.
Based on the usage data generated by the cloud and workloads, recommendations would be provided to downgrade or upscale computing resources. For instance, a database instance might have been provisioned with default IOPS and based on utilisation, only 30% IOPS is actually utilised. The cloud optimisation solution would provide recommendation to downgrade the IOPS numbers by utilising every bit of usage data to provide optimisation. Similarly if development environments are not being utilised on weekends and only available for business hours, based on actual usage utilisation, recommendation should be provided to turn off those computing resources. Similarly, recommendation can be provided to move towards serverless where constant workload is not required. There can be many opportunities where an AI engine can recommend upgrade/downgrade or even migration of services based on actual usage scenarios.
We would also see a lot of third party vendor solutions come up that would help customers choose and provision the right cloud services and optimise spends.
Summary
To summarise, various innovations would happen in cloud computing to help organisations modernise existing applications and build new cloud native solutions that can seamlessly run anywhere – be it on-prem, multi-clouds or on the edge.
Navveen Balani is Google Cloud Certified Fellow, having 20+ years of experience in building enterprise products and solutions using exponential technology, specialising in Cloud, AI, Blockchain, IoT. Prior to his current role, he was the CTO and co-founder of a cognitive retail startup. He is a former IoT and Watson Lab Leader for IBM India Labs, where he was responsible for setting up the Watson Lab and worked with customers across the globe on evaluating and building cognitive and IoT solutions.
His view and expertise on building and realising the Internet of Things, is well documented through his bestseller book –“Enterprise IoT”, where he describes the architecture, use cases and reference for building IoT applications using combinatorial power of Data, AI, Cognitive and Blockchain. His book is acknowledged as one of the Top computing books for 2016 by computingreviews.com and is being used as a reference by many IoT practitioners for building IoT architecture and solutions.
He is also an active blogger (navveenbalani.dev), author of several leading books (https://g.co/kgs/Ammbuf) and speaker at various leading conferences.
