The most important cloud advances of the decade
The technology gained momentum in the 2010s as companies started moving workloads off premises and cloud giants emerged.
Cloud computing has been perhaps the most transformative technology in the past several years and has changed the nature of how organizations work. Although cloud took root before 2010, the technology gained serious momentum in the 2010s, as evidenced by the number of offerings and companies that started moving some workloads off premises— followed by most or all of their businesses.
More than a third of organizations see cloud investments as a top three investing priority, which is impacting market offerings, according to Gartner. The firm also predicted that by the end of 2019, more than 30% of technology providers’ new software investments will shift from cloud-first to cloud-only.
Here are some of the most notable cloud advancements of the past decade.
By 2010, the three cloud giants—Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google—had all launched their cloud businesses. It was also the year that saw the birth of OpenStack, the leading open-source cloud software platform. Worldwide spending on public cloud started the decade at $77 billion, according to Statista, and was projected to finish it at $411 billion—more than five times that amount.
Realizing the scalability and elasticity of cloud services requires that cloud environments are defined by code. AWS CloudFormation, launched in 2011, brought a supported, consistent way of defining AWS cloud deployments to environments of all sizes, noted Brian Alletto, a senior architect at digital consultancy at West Monroe Partners. “This provided a key building block of infrastructure as code within the AWS ecosystem and facilitated the rapid expansion of pre-built solutions available ‘off the shelf’ to any AWS administrator,” Alletto said.
The serverless model is one in which functions are typically executed in the cloud. For all intents and purposes, serverless computing was essentially born at the 2014 AWS Reinvent conference, with Amazon Web Services’ announcement of Lambda. Microsoft and Google soon followed with their own platforms. Despite its name, serverless computing does not eliminate the need for a server. Rather, the software code is outsourced to the cloud provider’s infrastructure, where the application is automatically run at scale based on the request. The cloud provider maintains the server and manages resource allocation to burst and contract resources elastically as required. Pricing is based on the amount of resources consumed rather than on pre-purchased units of capacity.
Containers, which enable developers to manage and easily migrate software code, have surged in popularity. In 2013, Docker was released, but it was the initial release of Kubernetes in 2014 that really got the ball rolling, according to Alletto. That “began the widespread adoption of container-based architectures by enterprise IT shops and the required standardization of container-based solutions among all the major public cloud providers,” he said.
451 Research predicted that the application containers market would grow from $749 million in 2016 to more than $3.4 billion by 2021. Fifty-three percent of organizations are either investigating or using containers in development or production, according to a Cloud Foundry report. The use of cloud containers has become the new normal because they enable workload portability, said Kishore Durg, senior managing director of Accenture Cloud for Technology Services. “So you can take something that was written in one place and run it anywhere. That’s huge.”
Containers have spawned microservices, DevOps, hybrid/multicloud scenarios, and application modernization and migration, Durg said. Running apps on smaller services reduces cost and drives higher resource utilization and efficiency. Containers also gives businesses the ability to accelerate the development of newer technologies for competitive advantage, he said.
