A teenage wasteland

Looking at how popular hybrid cloud has become as a topic, and the slowing rate of change in mega-providers like Amazon and Google, it seems likely that public cloud is going to become something akin to a teenage wasteland - that part of life when people are caught in between maturity and childhood, fitting into neither fully, and basically wasting time doing whatever it is they're doing.

Cloud is already beginning to stagnate because of the sheer size of the largest providers that, to date, have been leading the market with new services. As the volume of transactions flowing through a provider grows, and the customer base broadens, it becomes increasingly difficult to innovate.

Standardisation will begin to take hold instead, which leaves enterprises wanting more. As a result, they will innovate or turn to smaller providers that are more willing to take chances and introduce new features, which will help them gain traction in what is really a very limited market.

This is prime time for network and infrastructure vendors, however, to partner with those smaller cloud providers, and help them find a way to offer unique services that the mega-providers are unwilling or unable to provide.

Already there's been the impact of the sheer size and growth of mega-providers: stagnation in the introduction of new services in the public cloud. After provisioning of server infrastructure came auto-scaling and load balancing services, but since then very little has appeared on the scene. This is logical, as the more customers/users of an infrastructure there are, the more disruptive it can be to introduce new services. Each iteration becomes increasingly longer, if for no other reason than for the integration and regression testing necessary to ensure a new service does not negatively impact existing services and cause a disruption to thousands of live applications.

An impact is also being felt as the call for standardisation becomes louder. As organisations continue to explore public cloud computing as an option for reducing costs and deployment cycles, they necessarily become concerned with lock-in and see (right or wrong) standardisation as a means to redress.

The issue is that the pressure to move faster and more efficiently from business stakeholders is not decreasing, but increasing for IT organisations. Leveraging a public cloud computing provider may, in short order, be seen as a waste of time, effort, and money simply because these large environments cannot keep meeting, in a timely fashion, the demands from organisations to provide the means by which services can be not only rapidly provisioned, but integrated with existing infrastructure systems.

This stagnation, coupled with an increasing focus on “IT as a service”, however, is driving organisations toward private and hybrid cloud computing models and toward smaller, more agile providers because of the need to provide more than just server provisioning as a service. IT organisations understand that the provisioning of compute resources is just the beginning of a complicated process requiring integration of multiple systems, applications, and infrastructure.

Stagnation at one end of the market almost always leads to innovation at the other.

Lori MacVittie is technical marketing manager for Application Services at F5 Networks.

Mega-providers today are moving slowly - if at all - toward providing such services, but IT is under pressure to provide that value now, and so it is turning to private and hybrid cloud solutions that entail partnering with smaller but more agile providers.

This is because private models and smaller cloud computing providers are both more capable of innovating and of gearing up their infrastructure for service, and thus enabling a more rapid maturation of the models and a faster return on investment. Smaller providers are more willing to adapt not only their offerings, but their framework APIs, to ensure a better chance at migration if necessary, which helps to alleviate - but not entirely ameliorate - the issue of vendor lock-in.

This affords infrastructure vendors an opportunity as well to hone their skills at providing their solutions, as services that can be easily exposed via provider frameworks or integrated into the underlying processes and solutions that drive cloud computing automation. Doing so provides real value to both cloud computing providers and direct customers embarking on private cloud initiatives, as the same infrastructure skills and frameworks can then be leveraged on-premise and off, which helps to build a value proposition for infrastructure and drives innovation.

Just as children inevitably arrive at a crossroads at which they either choose the path to maturity or continue to stagnate in a 'teenage-esque' wasteland, mega-providers are rapidly approaching a fork in the road that leads to continued innovation or stagnation.

But that does not mean that cloud itself will stagnate. On the contrary, the decreasing pace of innovation in mega-providers will simply enable growth in other areas of the market that will continue to assist organisations down the path of virtualisation to a fully automated and efficient data centre.

Stagnation at one end of the market almost always leads to innovation at the other. What remains to be seen is how mega-providers react to that innovation, as the traditional merger and acquisition route to consolidation of a market does not appear to be one that will be a viable bypass of the wasteland in the future.