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Recently, @thedodgeretort of Enterprise CIO Forum held a Twitter chat about what cloud computing in 2020 will look like. I decided to write up a quick blog sharing my thoughts on the topic.

Looking into the crystal ball, I see a few things happening with cloud by 2020: call it 5 years out.

First, cloud will transform into more of a utility and a grid of computing power. Second, we’ll see a much deeper manifestation of the core characteristics of cloud computing, especially with regard to flexible capacity, consistent access, and high portability. Third, I anticipate a lot of activity in machine-to-machine transactions and communications (call it IoT if you like). Fourth: superesilient applications. Fifth: compute traded as a commodity. And finally, within 5 years, I think IT and the overall business will come together to actually take advantage of these technologies. Read on for more detail.

Cloud Computing in 2020

1. A utility and computing grid

In 5 years, large companies will still hang on to their datacenters to run some services. However, with security more robust, I think that corporations will make available their own computing resources as much as they consume cloud resources – just like some households generate their own electricity and sell it back to the grid. I think Cisco’s Intercloud concept has an angle on this.

2. Flexible capacity, consistent access, and high portability

A cloud/compute socket just like an electrical socket. Standardized applications and connectors that “plug in” to the grid and are removed just as easily. Virtualization has the first stab at this, encapsulating the OS, data, and applications neatly in a VMX and VMDKs. Containers are the next stab. Redhat has an angle on this with their CloudForms PaaS. Raw compute power becomes more and more of a commodity as portability improves; meaning downward pressure on IaaS prices will remain to some degree (see #4).

3. IoT or machine-to-machine communications/transactions

One machine determines that it needs to acquire more compute power to complete its work. It makes a “deal” to go out and acquire that compute power, uses it, and gives it back to the grid. Or, on the flip side, a machine that knows when it can stand idle and rent its own power. Another angle on this, a virtual machine or application has knowledge of its SLA, and moves to the provider who can deliver on that SLA at the least cost. Love it or hate it, Apple’s Siri has an early angle on this. From what I’ve read about the technology, queries to Siri find their way back to Apple datacenters, not only to obtain answers, but to improve the accuracy of queries for all Siri users.

4. Superesilient applications

As prices for cloud trend downward and portability improves (see #2 and #5), disaster recovery will take a new shape. Instead of running on a 2-site/2-region DR architecture, applications will run on a 5, 10, 20, or 30-site “DR” architecture, with all nodes being active. Does it matter where your application is running at that point? Potentially, it’s running all over the east coast, or all over the country. Some services from AWS already have an angle on this with services that are redundant across regions (a.g., S3, elastic load balancing, etc.), not to mention things like DNS on the Internet. I think it will become cost-effective to do this, in general, within 5 years.

5. Compute traded as a commodity, just like crude oil

This might be a stretch in 5 years, but with the trend of IaaS being more commoditized and portability improving, we’ll see a day when compute power is traded in a commodities market. In the channel, this is already fairly common – IaaS providers are eager to cut favorable deals with resellers who agree to purchase large chunks of infrastructure upfront, only to resell at a later date.

6. IT and the business coming together

DevOps was the first marriage of two groups that had been previously at odds (oftentimes). Within 5 years, I think maturity in IT will improve to the point that they become as focused on the business as any other traditional LOB. IT becomes an Innovation Center — they are focused on the business, and behave proactively. Corporate IT shifts its focus from requirements to possibilities. See my previous posts on the emerging idea of a cloud architect who will be important in this shift.

To sum up… we’re just at the beginning of possibilities in cloud computing.

To hear more from John, you can download his eBook, “The Evolution of the Corporate IT Department“

By Chris Ward, CTO

Another year, another VMworld in the books. It was a great event this year with some key announcements and updates. First, some interesting stats:

The top 3 strategic priorities for VMware remain unchanged (Software Defined Datacenter/Enterprise, End User Computing, and Hybrid Cloud).  Some interesting numbers presented included on premise infrastructure is increasing at a rate of 4% year over year while off premise (primarily SaaS and IaaS) is growing at 25% year over year.  However, the overall market for on premise today is about $2 trillion while off premise (cloud) is about $45 billion, and most analysts are saying that even in the year 2020 that 75% of infrastructure will still exist on premise. 

The key takeaway here is that Hybrid will be the ultimate winner with most customers ending up with a mix of both on and off prem, and the secret will be getting the integration right.

Monday’s opening keynote contained several announcements outlined below.  I’ve categorized them into the three primary focus areas for VMW (SDDC, Hybrid Cloud, and EUC).

SDDC:

• There was some fun new naming of the management toolsets.  vRealize will now be the prefix to all management tools so vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) now becomes vRealize Automation, vCloud Operations Manager (vCOPS) now becomes vRealize Operations, etc.  There will be new suites of the management tools as well, known as the vRealize Suite, which replaces the vCenter Operations Suites.  There are a few versions/editions of the new vRealize Suites including….
  • vRealize Automation (formally vCAC), vRealize Operations (formally vCOPS), Log Insight, and ITBM Standard)
  • vRealize Operations Insight will include the vRealize Advanced Suite along with Log Insight.  This is targeted as an Upgrade Path to existing vSphere with Operations Management (vSOM) customers who want/need additional functionality.
  • vRealize Air Automation – As the ‘Air’ name implies, this is a service hosted in the public cloud and is essentially vCAC as a Service consumed via SaaS vs traditional on premise.  This will be released in Beta very soon and should be GA by Q1 2015.
  • Expect to also see vRealize Air Operations (vCOPS as a Service) around this same timeframe as well.
• vCloud Suite 5.8 was announced with major updates. These updates included tighter component integration, enhanced support for next generation applications, and proactive support.  On the integration front, this is mainly focused on tighter vCAC (now vRealize Automation) supportability with SRM and NSX.  The next gen app support is focused around Hadoop and containers (Docker), and the proactive support is really just the inclusion of the support assistant vCenter plugin.
• VMWare continues to join and support open source initiatives including joining OCP (Open Compute Project). They formally announced their own distribution of OpenStack.  The OpenStack announcement is pretty significant as VMware will now formally have their own supported distribution as they have seen numerous customers adopting OpenStack in the Enterprise.  The OCP announcement is important as well and is tied to the next announcement from the show……
• VMware is entering the hyper-converged infrastructure space with the introduction of EVO.  This is essentially a packaged software stack which will run on OEM hardware from vendors such as Dell, Fujitsu, Supermicro, etc. The key thing here is fast deployment. VMWare claims that once the systems are racked and cabled that it only takes 15 min to get a full software stack deployed (vSphere along with management capabilities and vSAN for storage).  EVO will come in two flavors, EVO Rail and EVO Rack.  The primary difference between them is scale. Rail starts at about 100 VM support scalable to 400 and Rack scaling is targeted more to enterprise level deployments.
• Other announcements on the SDDC side of the house include vSphere 6 Beta and vSAN 2.0 Beta along with vVOL Beta.  On the vSphere 6 side, major new functionality will include SMP enabled Fault Tolerance for up to 4 vCPU VMs, Cross vCenter vMotion and enhanced Long Distance vMotion.  Not much news on the vSAN 2.0 Beta but expect to see major storage manufacturers begin to release vVol support pretty soon.

Hybrid cloud: 

• There were more naming changes here as vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) will now be known as vCloud Air.  Any and all cloud based offerings from VMwrae going forward will have ‘Air’ in the name.
• The latest release of vCloud Connector has L2 overlay capabilities to extend a subnet across the WAN into vCloud Air.
• Launch of GOV cloud within vCloud Air to support federal government compliance.  Very similar to Amazon’s Gov cloud offering.
• On average, VMware is launching 1 new datacenter per month along with partnering with the existing 3,500 worldwide VSPP service providers.  Data sovereignty was brought up as a major point for the EU, and the fact that VMware has the VSPP partners means that they don’t necessarily have to make large CapEx investments in datacenters across all of the EU countries.  Additionally, any service that VMware makes available on vCloud Air will also be made available to the VSPP providers should they want to offer the same sort of service.
• Some new services to keep an eye out for include API level integration to existing DevOps toolsets, Database as a Service (DBaaS) with MS SQL and MySQL with Oracle coming down the road, object based storage utilizing EMC ViPR, and mobility tools via Airwatch running in vCloud Air. As mentioned above, we’ll also see the management toolsets being offered ‘as a service’ in early 2015 as well with Automation and Operations being the first two.
• Finally, the launch of vCloud Air ‘On Demand’ will be coming by end of year. This is essentially a way to consume the service via a quick credit card swipe and provision in as quickly as 30 seconds with Amazon style billing by the minute.

End user computing:

There’s a lot going on in this space since VMware had a big leadership change last year.  In 12 months we have seen the acquisitions of Desktone, Airwatch, and CloudVolumes along with expanded partnerships with F5, Google, and Nvidia.

• There was an announcement around doing not just Desktop as a Service (DaaS) but also Apps as a service in vCloud Air. There weren’t a lot of details here, but I assume it would be similar to what Microsoft is doing in Azure – essentially presenting individual apps via terminal services (but I need to do more digging on this one).
• With the release of vSphere 6, we will finally see true vGPU support with VIEW and the Nvidia GRID solution. The demos shown at the conference were impressive and on par with what we’ve seen from the XenServer/XenDesktop integration with GRID.
• The two most interesting things I saw were the CloudVolumes integration along with what VMware is calling ‘Project Fargo.’  I have looked at CloudVolumes in the past, and the technology is very slick from an application perspective.  The promise/vision is that you can get a persistent desktop experience in a non-persistent environment because you can dynamically deliver apps without the traditional ‘packaging’ required. Project Fargo is all about the concept of ‘forking’ whereby you can take an instant clone of a running VM without the overhead and scaling issues we typically see with Composer/Linked Clones.

All in all, another great VMworld. Obviously, this is a quick summary. If you would like to discuss in any more detail, shoot us an email at socialmedia@greenpages.com

By John Dixon, Consulting Architect

Last week, Chris Ward and I hosted a breakout session at Cloudscape 2014, GreenPages’ annual customer Summit. We spoke about cloud service models today (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS), as well as tomorrow’s models — loosely defined as XaaS, or Anything-as-a-Service. In this post, I’ll discuss XaaS: what it is and why you might want to consider using it.

First, what is XaaS? Is this just more marketing fluff? Why do we need to define yet another model to fully describe cloud services? I contest that XaaS is a legitimate term, and that it is useful to describe a new type of cloud services — those that make use of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS all neatly delivered in one package. Such packages are intended to fully displace the delivery of a commodity IT service. My favorite example of XaaS is desktop as a service, or DaaS. In a DaaS product, a service provider might assemble it with the following:

• Servers to run Virtual Desktop Infrastructure from a provider such as Terremark (IaaS)
• An office suite such as Microsoft Office365 (SaaS)
• Patching and maintenance services
• A physical endpoint such as a Chromebook or thin client device

The organization providing DaaS would design, assemble, and manage the product out of best-of-breed offerings in this case. The customer would pay one fee for the use of the product and have the all-important “one throat to choke” for the delivery of the product.

At GreenPages, we see the emergence of XaaS (such as DaaS) as a natural evolution of the market for cloud services. This sort of market behaviour is nothing new for other industries in a competitive market. Take a look at the auto industry (another one of my favorite examples). When you purchase a car, you are buying a single product from one manufacturer. That product is assembled from pieces provided by many other companies — from the paint, to the brake system, to the interior, to the tires, to the navigation system, to name a few. GM or Ford, for example, doesn’t manufacture any of those items themselves (they did in days past). They source those parts to specialist providers. The brakes come from Brembo. The interior is provided by Lear Corp. The Tires are from Goodyear. The navigation system is produced by Harman.

The auto manufacturer specializes in the design, marketing, assembly, and maintenance of the end product, just as a service provider does in the case of XaaS. When you buy an XaaS product from a provider, you are purchasing a single product, with guaranteed performance, and one price. You have one bill to pay. And you often purchase XaaS on a subscription basis, sometimes with $0 of capital investment.

So, secondly, why would you want to use XaaS? Let’s go back to our DaaS example.

At GreenPages, we think of XaaS as one of those products that can completely displace a commodity service that is delivered by corporate IT today. What are commodity services? I like to think of them as the set of services that every IT department delivers to its internal customers. In my mind, commodity IT services deliver little or no value to the top line (revenue) or bottom line (profit) of the business. Desktops and email are my favorite commodity services.

Increased investment in email or the desktop environment does not translate into increases in top-line revenue or bottom-line profit for the business. Consider that investment includes financial and time investments. So, why have an employee spend time maintaining an email system if it doesn’t provide any value to the business? Two key questions:

1. Does investment in the service return measurable value to the business?
2. In the market for cloud services, can your IT department compete with a specialist in delivering the service?

When looking at a particular service, if you answer is “No” to both questions, then you are likely dealing with a commodity service. Email and desktops are two of my favorite examples. Coming back to the original question… you may want to source commodity services to specialist providers in order to increase investment (time and money) on services that do return value to the business.

We’ll expand this discussion into the role of corporate IT in a future post. For now though, what do you think of XaaS? Would you use it to replace one of your commodity services? Maybe you already do. I’m interested to hear from you about which services you have chosen to source to specialist providers.

You can download John’s “The Evolution of Your Corporate IT Department” eBook here