SERVERLESS, HYBRID… WHAT IS COMING NEXT FOR THE CLOUD?

Posted on May 14, 2018 by Yann Tromeur

We have a saying in France which is “c’est dans les vieux pots que l’on fait les meilleures soupes”. You would translate it litterally to « it is in the oldest cooking pots you make the best soup ». Basically we mean, proven methods / people are better than new ones / newbies.

You wonder: “why is this French guy relating this old saying to hybrid cloud?”. Let’s dive in.

Cloud Technology is an old as the rise of the Internet.

It was 199x(5-67) and well AOL was the ruler. Internet entered our homes and businesses, changing our economy forever. Compaq (do you remember?) apparently said it first. No GAFA at the time though.

So yes, Cloud is the “old pot” I was mentioning earlier.

Since the mid-nineties, things have changed “hum” a “little”. The “then World Wide Web” has since evolved to our Internet; disrupting along the way, our means of communication, our social behavior, the entertainment industry and last but not least the control of our privacy.

Though the purpose of this article is business-oriented, I think it is important to evoke the events that lead us to the current state of the cloud : it is an old and broadly used paradigm.

People / companies who still claim the cloud is the thing to be / to have are simply out of fashion.

The cloud is there. Period.

In its various forms, public and private or serverless, it still means the same: if you are a person or a company using “A” cloud, it means your computing / storage resources for your files are “out there”. Kind of in a black box, most of the people don’t know (and don’t care).

Since it is an old technology, it means we are soon to reach the height of its growth phase or worst at the end of its maturity. Hence, we came up with the serverless and hybrid concepts : but do not let them fool you ! These are still the same ol’ Cloud we are selling.

Serverless is basically reaching out to the developers. Micro-services extensive usage will leverage control and flexibility for cloud application development reducing the need of hard to maintain server architecture.

Hybrid is giving you the best of both worlds. You can still have complex / secured onsite infrastructure and use cloud services or servers to improved flexibility on storage with your IT still managing everything altogether, offering seamless services to Business users.

Both paradigms are described as the future of business IT.

Still relying on the same Cloud principles, they are presenting the same defects, mainly I would say : security guarantee / management and localization (one big datacenter) / availability.

The only true change for the future is in your hand, literally : mobility is the key. With the extension of mobility, the capacity of those devices and the promise of high speed wireless networks, the future of cloud is going to be distributed.

The services, the storage, the processing will not be contained in big datacenter but will be constituted of a myriad of small (and powerful) independent and interconnected encrypted devices. The cloud will be safer, fluider and certainly more sustainable.

After all a cloud is made of billions of water drops. Tell me what you think of it, please do not hesitate to comment.