To The Cloud?

Topics:

Current buzz: iPhone 5 anyone?

Dave:    Cloud Connect Round Up  (Dave and JP, Chris comments)

Chris: Top 10 PaaS Trends of the Next Five Years

Article by Chris Preimesberger over at eWeek, worth taking a look at as he has some predictions in here that are intriguing:

1. Workload growth will drive PaaS adoption - it isn’t do more with less in many industries, now it’s just “please do more with what we’ve already got”
2. IaaS Providers will subsume PaaS Providers - the likes of Amazon, Rackspace, HPCS, CloudStack, OpenStack, Dell’s vCloud, IBM’s SmartCloud, Eucalyptus, and Azure will integrate the middleware.  Alternatively, PaaS will integrate down and bypass the IaaS providers (battlefront?)
3. Public PaaS will win the SMB market
4. The enterprise market will be won by private PaaS - reliability, security, limitations of one size fits all etc.
5. Open source PaaS will flourish
6. Open source PaaS will be delivered via Linux distros - Ubuntu includes Cloud Foundry utils and client already
7. Proprietary PaaS will start to look like open source - APIs in particular
8. PaaS compatibility?  Try combatibility . . . standards and business models
9. Orchestration and configuration management will merge with PaaS IT
10. Hybrid will win the cloud war, thanks to PaaS - demand meets burst etc. - Chef, Puppet, Juju

JP:

My piece today is not a new story but a beef. I’m tired of people saying, “It’s in the cloud”. I blame Microsoft for this with those awful commercials. There’s an Internet and there’s cloud computing. The Internet and cloud are not synonymous. When you upload data into the Internet, you don’t know if it’s stored in a cloud architecture or just on some direct attached storage on a Linux box in a rack in a data center. The thing is the consumer should not see or touch the cloud. It’s a supporting infrastructure and architectural approach to provide scalability and elasticity to the application that the consumer is using. SO, please stop saying it’s in the cloud. You can say I uploaded to the Internet, or the data is online, but it’s not “in the cloud”.