The Five Most Important Cloud Computing Trends Of 2021
Cloud computing trends picked up speed in India last year. There is hardly a company that no longer deals with the relevant technologies and services.
In addition to managed public clouds and hybrid and multi-cloud environments, the topics of infrastructure as code and DevOps will continue to gain importance.
Managed public clouds
With the India Amazon Web Services ( AWS ) region opening in Delhi, the public cloud also arrived in India.
Their importance is underlined by numerous customer references and, in some cases, innovative use cases. But not only AWS will continue to cause a sensation in the coming year.
However, there are several protagonists in an exciting story. IT users are once again playing the leading role in the public cloud.
A high level of complexity in usability – keyword: cloud knowledge – and a previously unclear communication of responsibilities – keyword: self-service / shared responsibility – cause confusion and impair public cloud adaptation.
The white knights who will defuse the situation for both providers and users are the Managed Public Cloud Provider (MPCP). They develop and operate their customers’ systems, applications, and virtual environments on the public cloud infrastructures.
In doing so, they compensate for the company’s lack of cloud knowledge and solve the problem of shared responsibility. It is one important Cloud computing trends.
Hybrid and multi-cloud integration
As part of their company’s digital transformation, CIOs are faced with the challenge of not neglecting their legacy and compliance-critical systems and introducing new types of infrastructure and IT environments to support modern workloads and Cloud computing trends
Therefore, it has been shown that two worlds belong to a modern IT environment: Dynamic IT and Static IT. What is already becoming apparent is that dynamic IT environments, implemented primarily based on public cloud environments, are not only being set up by a single provider.
Instead, diversity is required. Because there is no one-stop-shop with the ideal cloud portfolio, in addition, innovations can only be purchased from different suppliers, and, in principle, not all eggs belong in a single nest. CIOs should therefore take two approaches.
This includes multi-cloud management, in which applications and systems operated in IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS environments do not necessarily have to be integrated.
Nevertheless, the primary challenge is to keep track of all the cloud services and offers used. With hybrid integration, CIOs are taking a serious step. After all, the real added value of cloud systems only arises when they are interlinked and can work on a shared database or mutually data change.
For example, it should be a matter of course that a cloud-based CRM service can access data from an ERP system.
In this context, multi-cloud integration is the premier class. Companies use a colorful mix of different types of cloud – infrastructures, platforms, and software services – which they use partly independently but primarily integrate consistently.
With such a cloud development plan (digital platform fabric), it is essential on the one hand to ensure unconditional interaction, but on the other hand to keep a clear perspective.
Platform services
Microservices architectures are the ultimate trend when it comes to developing modern systems and application landscapes.
By breaking applications down to the atomic level processes and functions (“microservices”), updates or patches only relate to individual parts of the system and never to the entire application.
In this way, individual microservices can easily be replaced with new ones, and innovations can be implemented with a short “time to market.”
When developing a microservice architecture, it is primarily a matter of focusing on your application architecture and developing your microservices. However, building up the necessary skills or finding the right staff is still not easy today.
With platform services, a trend has been established in recent years with which CIOs and CTOs can support their development teams with already finished microservices.
Public cloud IaaS providers such as amazon web services or Microsoft Azure are driving the trend forward.
A platform service encapsulates a closed functionality and is developed and operated independently. A small, independent software component (service) provides a partial function within an extensive, distributed software application.
With these services, applications can be developed more quickly because the building blocks no longer have to be developed in-house and can be used directly as modules in your source code.
This allows developers and IT departments to concentrate fully on developing the actual core functionality of their defocus.
With these enablement services, you can react better to the requirements from the specialist departments and thus ensure a shorter time-to-market.
Infrastructure as Code
Administrator 1.0 clicks – administrator 2.0 programs! This is how the fundamental change in the data center describes, driven by cloud computing and the automation of the IT infrastructure’s ordering, configuration, deployment, and administration processes in full swing.
For IT infrastructure decision-makers, Infrastructure as Code is the next evolutionary step on the way to a dynamic and autonomous infrastructure basis.
It is the logical consequence of the technological development in the areas of “software-defined data centers” and “infrastructure-as-a-service,” i.e., cloud infrastructure services made available via API on cloud platforms (Cloud computing trends) and based on commands that can be configured on the command line.
In the future, administrators will need to script instead of screws. Because the IT infrastructure of the future, the “Digital Infrastructure Platform,” no longer provides hardware, but rather Infrastructure available as a service.
Companies that do not want to face this trend with their human resources will create enormous demand for so-called “managed public cloud services” in the next few years.
DevOps
Anyone who wants to play a leading role in the age of “digital business” can no longer avoid quickly picking up on new customer requests and innovations while at the same time ensuring high-performance and stable IT operations.
In addition, there is the fundamental ability to quickly adapt to new technologies and features in the digital world.
Companies can only remain competitive in the long term if they can quickly expand their applications with new functions and services and offer them on standard mobile devices.
This goes hand in hand with the fact that no leading digital company can do without using highly scalable cloud infrastructure services ( IaaS, PaaS ).
In particular, companies that have understood utilizing application performance monitoring how to optimize their applications and IT infrastructures are faced with how this can look organizationally and in terms of tools. The magic word is DevOps.
For several years, this term has been used to summarize approaches and tools intended to support the interlinking of “development” and “operations.”
The central aspects of a DevOps approach are efficient collaboration, automation, fully documented processes, and live monitoring.
Efficient communication and collaboration across departmental and company boundaries is an essential requirement for this.
The introduction of a microservice architecture can help an IT department react better to the requirements from the specialist departments and thus to ensure a shorter time-to-market.
However, it should no longer be thought in terms of independent silos, but rather a digital umbrella should be stretched over the entire organization.
This also includes introducing the DevOps model to develop the microservices in small teams because modern development and collaboration tools enable development in teams scattered around the world.
