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Tag: cloud providers

  • Best of 2022: Three Cloud Trends to Watch in 2022

    Best of 2022: Three Cloud Trends to Watch in 2022

    As we close out 2022, we at devopsy.kinsta.cloud wanted to highlight the most popular articles of the year. Following is the latest in our series of the Best of 2022.

    Many developers and startups view cloud services as simply “compute”, “storage” and “networking.” The cloud has matured to the point where customers often don’t think about the underlying infrastructure, service levels or debate the merits of on-premises versus cloud&;mdash;instead, they are increasingly cloud-first. In fact, December of 2021 marked Amazon Web Services (AWS) marked its tenth AWS re:Invent conference—the company’s annual conference for customers and partners.

    While many startups don’t think twice about centering their IT strategy around the cloud and SaaS offerings, the enterprise has been slower to adopt cloud computing at scale. The conversation for these companies revolves around security, compliance, SLAs and the loss of control over their technology stack. In many ways, little has changed about the questions that enterprises are asking about the cloud.

    As the year starts, I’ve been reflecting on various conversations I’ve had with a variety of IT and business leaders, Digital CxOs and vendors. Below are three trends that I will be tracking this year.

    1. Alternative Vendors Gain Momentum

    The “big three” hyperscalers continue to dominate the market and garner the bulk of customer and partner attention. However, we are seeing increasing interest in the alternative cloud market. The alternative market includes vendors outside of the big names (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle, IBM and Salesforce). Developers and businesses are increasingly looking at alternative vendors and their offerings because they are easier to use than hyperscalers, less expensive and offer more predictable pricing models. In addition, with the tight labor market, hiring developers that are, for example, AWS certified can be extremely expensive. On the other hand, because alternative clouds are less complex, developers do not need to have the same certifications.

    You might ask: What about the global scalability, quantum computing and/or the thousands of APIs that the hyperscalers offer? The truth is that most small and midsize businesses don’t actually need any of those capabilities and don’t want to help subsidize the R&D that these technologies require. Companies to watch in the alternative cloud market include Linode, Digital Ocean, OVHcloud, UpCloud, Hetzner and Equinix Metal. In 2021, Techstrong Research published a report, DevOps and the Alternative Cloud, that dives deeper into these alternatives.

    2. Industry-Specific Cloud Ecosystems Expand

    Banking, insurance and companies in other highly-regulated industries have been slow to adopt cloud computing. However, the market is quickly evolving and businesses are rethinking their approach to the cloud. One of the reasons these regulated companies are starting to invest more heavily in the cloud is because customers have heightened expectations when it comes to how they engage with businesses. If customers are unhappy, it’s easier than ever to find alternatives. These highly-regulated companies and industries are being increasingly challenged by fintech, insurtech, healthtech and other industry-focused startups.

    Just as importantly, vendors are realizing that one size doesn’t fit all. Regulated industries need specific clouds that meet their regulatory and compliance needs. These industry-focused clouds aren’t being designed as an entire ecosystem where a variety of technology partners can offer their software to regulated industries. Instead, vendors have taken two different approaches to offering industry-specific offerings. Some providers are offering pre-built but customizable applications. Some notable announcements in the area of banking clouds include the following:

    • Goldman Sachs and AWS are working together to create data management and analytics solutions for financial services organizations (announced at re:Invent 2021). The result of this collaboration is the Goldman Sachs Financial Cloud for Data. It’s unclear if AWS will be offering a more general financial services ecosystem in the future.
    • IBM continues to grow its Cloud for Financial Services in terms of signature clients and partners. IBM built its cloud for financial services in collaboration with Bank of America, then hired the bank’s CTO, Howard Boville, to head up IBM’s hybrid cloud business.
    • Microsoft announced general availability of the Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services in November of 2021 (interestingly, it’s not named Azure for Financial Services). The company already has a large footprint in the financial services industry, and we’ll be tracking the adoption of Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services closely. In September 2021, Wells Fargo unveiled their digital infrastructure strategy that relies heavily on its partnership with Microsoft, but there is no mention of Wells Fargo using the Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services.

    I expect other industry-specific clouds to follow a similar pattern—with large vendors partnering with key industry incumbents to create cloud ecosystems that meet the performance, security and compliance requirements for that industry. For example, you can certainly imagine Oracle creating a Cloud for Health Care after the acquisition of Cerner closes.

    3. Software Supply Chain Becomes a Key Security Focus

    “Supply chain” was a key phrase across all industries and job functions in 2021. I’m particularly tracking the software supply chain—which, as you can imagine, is immense and complex. In essence, your software supply chain includes anything that might impact your software. That includes APIs, cloud services, containers, your DevOps pipeline and all of the open source components that you use. Software has many dependencies, and understanding the supply chain is critical to knowing your security and risk exposure. Take, for instance, the recent Apache Log4j vulnerability. Use of Log4j is pervasive, but how many companies were actually able to quickly identify what software is at risk? Check out Alan Shimel’s December blog post, Log4j: It’s All About the Supply Chain, Baby! to learn more about software supply chain security. In addition, API security is going to be a very hot topic in 2022.

    However, people remain the number-one cybersecurity threat. Although complex cyberattacks by ransomware gangs and state-sponsored actors get much of the attention, cloud misconfigurations and unpatched software are likely your biggest threats. Understanding your software supply chain will help uncover potential weak points and allow you to add automation, observability and/or other security tools to help spot potential problems.

    The Cloud Evolution

    Although the cloud isn’t new, the cloud market is continually evolving. While the developer community has been quick to adopt cloud computing, large enterprises have lagged—and regulated industries have been even slower. The alternative cloud market is offering different options for developers and businesses that don’t want the complexities of hyperscalers and don’t need their endless options and global footprint. At the same time, regulated industries are changing their cloud strategies thanks to cloud offerings that are uniquely focused on the challenges of their industry. Finally, you need to secure your software and data no matter where it resides. Focusing on your software supply chain will help ensure you can react to security vulnerabilities and update elements when needed.

  • Survey Sees Alternative Cloud Service Providers Gaining Ground

    Survey Sees Alternative Cloud Service Providers Gaining Ground

    A survey of 458 development professionals, managers and senior leaders conducted by Techstrong Research, a sister entity of devopsy.kinsta.cloud, found 43% are considering adding additional cloud service providers in the next 12 months. In total, nearly two-thirds said they are at least considering, evaluating or are ready to buy from a trusted alternative cloud vendor, with 20% reporting they have already contracted one.

    The survey, conducted on behalf of Linode, an arm of Akamai Technologies that provides cloud services, found a full 93% of survey respondents are already using either Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Compute Platform (GCP). Nearly two-thirds (65%) reported they already used more than one cloud service provider. More than a quarter (28%) said they are using alternative providers to augment services they consume from either AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM Rackspace or Alibaba. And 19% said they are using a hyperscaler and an alternative cloud service provider.

    The biggest drivers respondents cited for using alternative providers are reducing reliance on a single provider (55%), improved price/performance (38%) and recent cloud outages (31%).

    Respondents also said they are concerned that large providers might one day compete with them as they expand their reach into other industry segments (24%) or may engage in business practices that would create a moral conflict (19%). A quarter (25%) said they already viewed their cloud service provider as a competitor.

    Dan Kirsch, principal analyst for Techstrong Research, said as cloud computing continues to mature, it is becoming apparent that more organizations are considering their options when it comes to consuming commodity compute, storage and networking services. Many organizations simply don’t need to access complex cloud services, he noted. A total of 42% of respondents said a cloud service provider offering core infrastructure primatives could handle 90% of their typical workloads. In many cases, alternative cloud service providers are being used to augment rather than replace a hyperscale cloud service provider, noted Kirsch.

    Overall, nearly three-quarters of respondents (74%) said they expect their infrastructure will be cloud-based by the end of this year. Nearly three-quarters of respondents buy cloud services directly from an infrastructure provider, with the rest employing a managed services provider or some other type of third-party cloud services reseller.

    More than one-third of respondents also reported using a payment mechanism other than a contract or request for proposal (RFP), according to the study. Among customers of alternative cloud providers, more than two-thirds (67%) are using some other payment mechanism, with one-quarter using cryptocurrencies to pay. That option is becoming increasingly important because more organizations are looking for ways to reduce costs by employing alternative payments, said Kirsch.

    In other cases, IT professionals are looking for an end-run around cumbersome purchasing processes or simply opt to use alternative payment methods as a matter of personal preference, he added. Alternative providers, as a general rule, are more open to processing these types of payments, noted Kirsch.

    The shift to the cloud has clearly been accelerating since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. But as the landscape continues to evolve, there are now more options than ever for IT organizations to consider as the cloud becomes the preferred platform on which to deploy applications.

  • Providers

    Providers

  • Do You Trust Your Cloud Provider to Protect Your Data? Maybe You Shouldn’t

    Do You Trust Your Cloud Provider to Protect Your Data? Maybe You Shouldn’t

    Around the world, businesses are moving to the cloud at a rapid rate. But, is the cloud really the best place to store your mission-critical data and applications? Is it truly a safe place to put data and apps that need strong protection?

     The immediate answer from many companies is “yes.” A recent study by Dimension Research, found that 59% of organizations believe data backed up to the public cloud is safer than data backed up on-premises. Further, the study showed that nearly half of all organizations (46%) believe it is the responsibility of their cloud provider to recover data and applications in the event of an attack or loss.

    Are these beliefs about the safety of cloud data correct? Can organizations rely solely on their cloud service provider such as Google or Amazon Web Services (AWS) for data protection?

    Leading providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform typically secure core infrastructure and services as part of their responsibility. But, when it comes to securing data, that responsibility lies squarely in the hands of customers. Organizations that overlook this simple fact face a much higher likelihood of suffering a serious data loss.

    Yet, the general perception remains that if something happens to your data, it’s not your responsibility. Too many organizations have convinced themselves that their cloud provider will take care of solving any issues for them and magically recover all their data if it’s lost.

    Unfortunately, that is not the case. Take, for instance, data generated in a cloud app like Microsoft’s Office 365. Yes, Microsoft guarantees the service, but it doesn’t guarantee the security of the data you generate when using the service.

    Office 365 does have some basic data protection schemes in place, such as a 30-day recycle bin that allows users to recover and restore deleted data within a 30-day window. That’s important because users will sometimes accidentally delete or purge their data and then realize they need it for legal reasons. After that 30-day limit, however, the data is gone for good. Microsoft, for its part, makes this clear in its terms of service: Users own their data and are responsible for what happens to it.

    This misconception around data responsibility is somewhat understandable. In particular, the StorageCraft study found that small and midsize companies are much more likely to believe that their cloud provider will bail them out in the event of a data loss. For instance, 52% of midsize companies believe their cloud provider is responsible for data recovery, compared to just 43% of enterprise companies who believe the same.

    Many of these smaller businesses trust that sophisticated, near trillion-dollar cloud providers such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon have ironclad capabilities when it comes to data protection. They think they don’t have to worry, and they’re in good hands. While that’s generally true, they don’t realize that data loss and recovery are separate issues and their own responsibility.

    There is also a strong belief among organizations with a cloud-first strategy that their data is safer in a public cloud than it is in an on-premises facility. The study found that 76% of companies with an overt cloud strategy feel their data is safer in the cloud, compared to just 37% of companies that prefer to store their data on-premises.

    Trust in the cloud also varies by culture. For instance, 71% of organizations in France believe that data backed up to a public cloud is safer than on-premises. By contrast, only 37% of German companies feel the same way. Likewise, the study found that 59% of French companies believe data recovery is the responsibility of their cloud provider, compared to just 41% of German companies.

    At the risk of overgeneralizing, one might conclude that Germans feel a greater need to be in control of their own data, while French companies have a more laissez-faire attitude toward data recovery, entrusting that their cloud providers will take care of any issues.

    But no business, wherever it’s located, should have a false sense of security. The truth is that, whether it’s an issue of data corruption, a security breach or even accidental data deletion, the onus is on you to recover that data, not your cloud provider.

    So, then the question all companies need to ask is this: When something bad happens, how are you going to get your data back? Then ask yourself what level of risk you can tolerate and what kind of data you are putting in the cloud. Is it data that’s mission-critical and can you afford to lose it? Will your business run exactly the same without that data you just lost? And if not, how bad will the impact be?

    Once organizations realize they can’t rely on their cloud provider, they start to understand what kind of data-recovery capabilities they do have and also what they might need to add to stay protected.

    The good news is there are easy-to-use, cost-effective solutions that enable organizations to simply, yet powerfully, manage their data storage and backup requirements, whether on-premises or in the cloud. Instead of mistrusting their cloud provider, organizations can simply set up a truly effective data-recovery strategy. Adding that extra, yet highly necessary, layer of protection to your cloud data could be the difference between a business that successfully responds to adversity and one that succumbs to disaster within days, while realizing that it relied on cloudy promises.

  • How to Manage Data in Hybrid Cloud Environments

    How to Manage Data in Hybrid Cloud Environments

    We’ve long-since established that multi-generational, multi-cloud environments are the new norm. But, how does one go about managing data in those environments?

    In this post, we’ll take a look at the ramifications of this hybrid cloud reality and best practices for managing your data for increased scalability and heightened availability.

    It’s All Cloud

    Whether it’s Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure (or some combination thereof), cloud is all the rage, with a hybrid approach gaining momentum with 81% of cloud users working with two or more providers (according to a recent Gartner study). Not only does this strategy take companies out of the business of hosting their own applications, but it also leads to benefits such as avoiding vendor lock-in, reduced costs and optimized performance.

    Benefits to Mixing Cloud and On-Prem Environments

    Mixing cloud and on-prem environments means you can pick and choose where your workloads and data live—it’s really an optimization. For example, if your application is CPU intensive, you can run it on the cloud provider that gives you the most CPU for your dollar. Similarly, if your data workload requires significant storage, you can go to the cloud provider that offers the best bang for your buck on storage.

    Businesses should look at their application and database and then use the cloud provider that offers the best of class for that workload. A mixed cloud also gives you the ability to always have a low-cost secondary site recovery plan in place—you’re always ready to spin up on another cloud provider if you need to. 

    Managing Data: The Challenges of Hybrid Cloud

    The benefits of multi-cloud are many, but when it comes to managing your data, things can get tricky. Not only do you have multiple cloud providers to balance, you also have to consider data stored on-premises and how that data is accessed from the cloud. 

    You also have to consider data replication between clouds. If you’re not doing a full mirror of your data between each cloud, it’s critical you remain acutely aware of what data lives where. You’ll want to consider creating extensive documentation and diagrams of what data lives in which cloud. If you are replicating data between clouds, you also have to justify the additional operating and engineering cost to accomplish your goal. 

    How to Manage Data in Hybrid Cloud Environments

    Fortunately, there are several libraries providing abstractions for cloud services, such as object stores. Leveraging abstractions within your applications allows you to move more freely between cloud providers. 

    Companies should strongly consider storing their data in a consistent manner within each cloud, leveraging the same technologies to reduce the sprawl, maintenance and expertise required to operate those technologies. For example, use a relational database that all the cloud vendors provide—for data updated and changed frequently, it should live in the scope of the local cloud provider to reduce latency and network costs, because traffic within the cloud provider is generally free. If you were to write to a database outside the cloud provider, it’d cost more and be considerably slower.

    The leaders in the cloud provider space offer a fairly secure environment for storing sensitive data, as long as you’re following good practices and using your own source of encryption. However, it all comes down to your individual environment. For some organizations, there will be workloads that should remain on-premises—for instance, highly sensitive data for which regulations require on-premises storage.

    If data has to be stored and encrypted on-premises, many cloud providers offer a secure means of connecting your cloud environments to your on-premises environment for access to sensitive information, such as providing secure VPN connectivity to virtual private clouds. 

    Multi-cloud might not be for everyone; you have to weigh the benefits with the costs, especially as those factors relate to your individual organization. While there are pitfalls, the practices and tooling to effectively manage your data in hybrid cloud environments are all out there. Because so many of us are choosing to run our workloads on multiple clouds, collectively we’ve overcome many of the aforementioned challenges and can take advantage of all the benefits hybrid cloud provides.

  • From DevOps to DevSecOps: Owning Cloud Security

    From DevOps to DevSecOps: Owning Cloud Security

    The cloud is a complex environment, with different groups managing different cloud services and environments. The most basic division is between the cloud provider, who provides the core infrastructure, and the customer, who leverages services or builds their applications using resources leased from the provider. Within larger organizations, different cloud resources, data and applications may be owned by various lines of business, each with their own budget and development resources.

    From a security perspective, this sort of divided ownership of the cloud can create severe challenges in terms of end-to-end visibility, control and compliance. Of course, the cloud is a shared infrastructure, and when it comes to security events, there will likely always be some shared responsibility. But the lack of a centralized security strategy and inconsistent security policies and standards leading to potential grey areas of responsibility can create serious security gaps, and put critical data and other digital resources at risk.

    Cloud Provider vs. Customer Responsibility

    When respondents to a recent survey by IHS Markit were asked, “who is truly responsible when there is a vulnerability or security event in their cloud deployment?” the answer reflected a lack of understanding of the basic division of responsibility. Even in the best-case scenario, where it should be clear as to who is responsible for a security event (such as a vulnerability in the cloud platform), only about half of respondents were able to identify the root cause and responsibility.

    Complicating things further, there is yet another set of tools as to which responsibility should be clear. The list of security vendors available as add-ons through a cloud provider’s marketplace is exhaustive. The cloud providers themselves also offer a range of security solutions (built into their platforms as services). And many of the cloud management platforms, hypervisors, orchestration tools and other bits of cloud infrastructure have various levels of security available.

    However, the truth is adhering to the shared responsibility model, whenever the customer applies any configuration to these tools, they become his responsibility. Nonetheless, divisions of responsibilities are not always clear for different events.

    The best course of action is to identify and apply best practices to any resource and service consumed in the cloud. A root cause analysis (RCA) playbook should identify possible threats and plot actions where possible, and plot strategies for determining the root cause of an event. This includes identifying all key stakeholders, determining which investigation tools are available for threat analysis, establishing processes for orchestrating responses and resources between all parties and digitize and map those details to actual cloud technologies. Further, any response should be automated as much as possible.

    Security Responsibilities Within the Customer Domain

    Once the primary divisions of responsibility for a dealing with a security event is worked out between providers, vendors and customers–such as determining if a security breach is the result of a corrupted service or a misconfigured system–most cloud customers still have to address the divisions of responsibility within their own organization.

    The challenge is, when it comes to cloud security, too many companies don’t have a good handle on who is responsible for what. Part of the challenge is many organizations have taken an ad hoc approach to cloud development. As a result, today’s organizations, with an average of five different cloud environments in place and two or more in development, may be hamstrung by the challenge that each cloud instance might be owned by different lines of business.

    For many reasons, these groups may be reluctant to turn over the security of their individual cloud environment to the central security team. For example, speed is a critical component of DevOps efforts, so any security implementation that interferes with their primary objective of delivering applications is going to be a problem.

    Part of the reason is traditional IT security teams rarely know much about cloud environments, and the security tools they recommend often bottleneck development. However, handing over to the DevOps teams building out cloud applications and environments is problematic as they have little to no expertise when it comes to security.

    For example, one of the biggest challenges of many cloud-based security tools is the time and skill required to properly configure and manage them, let alone adjusting those configurations to eliminate false positives, or to ensure they don’t miss critical events or drop legitimate traffic. All that requires expertise most DevOps teams don’t have.

    Shifting from DevOps to DevSecOps

    Resolving this challenge can be as simple as adding a cybersecurity specialist to each of the various DevOps teams. Once integrated, DevSecOps can help navigate the fine line of the shared responsibility model to ensure both development and security requirements are met. They can negotiate between the customer/vendor/provider responsibility model, provide strategies for ensuring consistent security across and between cloud instances, and balance protection with performance.

    Part of that is achieved through the selection, deployment and management of tools designed to meet the twin challenges of speed and security. For example, many SaaS-based security solutions, such as web application firewalls, are self-scalable, allowing web applications to grow as needed without compromising protection. Choosing the right tool can also ensure it can be easily stitched into an application transaction with minimal effort. Some of them even have the advantage of having already included deployment, maintenance, scaling and fine-tuning functions.

    The proper application of automation plays an equally critical role in this process. Checking configurations and scanning objects for malware are time-consuming activities that can get pushed to the side when other issues arise. Automated cloud security solution selected and designed by the DevSecOps team can provide comprehensive configuration assessments, dynamically secure stored data, automatically scan for public cloud vulnerabilities, identify misconfigurations that put data at risk, scan files stored in the cloud and prevent the unauthorized downloading of sensitive information.

    Building a DevSecOps Team Requires Executive Support

    DevOps has become part of C-suite and board-level discussions, attesting to the growing critical value of web applications and digital transformation as part of the broader business strategy. However, if the frequency of breaches and the growing concerns of CISOs are any indication, executives aggressively pushing for cloud solutions often have a mistaken understanding of the nature of the security risks that cloud adoption and careless DevOps programs can introduce into their organization.

    Therefore, it is critical executive leadership is educated on the risks associated with expanding an organization’s digital footprint, and as a result, its new potential attack surface. Expanding DevOps to DevSecOps enables the integration of security into new cloud environments on day one. It can also ensure RCA cloud security playbooks are developed and followed, and help introduce and manage security solutions designed to protect critical digital resources without introducing unreasonable risks. Finally, it can provide a much-needed buffer against fines and penalties associated with regulatory requirement violations should their cloud deployment become a conduit for a severe system breach.

    — Lior Cohen

  • Out of Date: Cloud Anti-Trends of 2019

    Out of Date: Cloud Anti-Trends of 2019

    Let’s talk about 2019 cloud tech anti-trends. A lot of those anti-trends are nothing but cloud myths, which are still widely spread and talked about.

    In this article, we’ll take a look at some anti-trends and try to understand where’s the myth part in them.

    Private Cloud Is Not Popular Anymore

    According to the IDC research organization, by 2021, companies from around the world will spend more than half a billion dollars on cloud tech. This is two times more than in 2016. At the same time, there is a clear tendency: The public cloud workloads are growing, while the situation is exactly opposite for the private cloud. Cisco said, after three years 73% of the company’s applications will move to the public cloud, while just a year ago this figure was around 50%.

    Such a shift is partly caused by cloud providers, who offer users of public clouds more and more features that simplify the development of services. For example, tools that allow creating machine learning models, manage software deployment processes and analyze logs.

    That’s why many felt the active development of a public cloud meant the final decline of the private cloud niche. During his speech at a conference last year, Anthony Lai, senior vice president of the cloud-based division of NetApp said private clouds would “die out.”

    I wouldn’t expect the private cloud to disappear completely. The statement that it will cease to exist is only partly true. The private cloud may disappear as an independent unit, but it will remain part of the hybrid IT infrastructure.

    As noted in Gartner, 72% of companies in the world use a hybrid strategy. And it is expected this figure will grow. According to analysts from Market Research, the market for cloud object storage systems will reach six billion dollars by 2023. This will definitely spur further development of the hybrid IT infrastructure.

    One reason to use private clouds is predictable business processes.

    Yes, the public cloud offers flexible scaling. The company does not have to urgently buy new hardware if the load on the services has increased dramatically (for example, the application became a success and tons of new users came in). In this case, you can simply rent additional computing power. But if the load can be predicted (say, it is static) a private cloud is often enough.

    Also, a private cloud is often used to create object storage. Sure, object storage services are also available in the public cloud and a number of companies use them. Just a couple of years ago, Netflix migrated its entire infrastructure to the public cloud.

    However, not all companies need to build a distributed infrastructure as Netflix did. There are cases when companies have object storage in a private cloud because it already has an appropriate low-cost automated infrastructure. CERN is one of them. All the data generated by the Large Hadron Collider is stored in a private cloud.

    The IT-Infrastructure Market Is Oversaturated with Specialists

    Today, companies are actively abandoning their own infrastructure in favor of cloud solutions. That is why the need for in-house specialists engaged in its maintenance, gradually disappears. The IaaS provider takes on many issues related to the management and administration of the infrastructure, and the specialists need only ensure that everything is set up correctly.

    That is also why companies often abandon their own IT departments. At first glance, it seems this will gradually lead to instability in the labor market. Experts in the field of IT infrastructure, system administrators and data center operators will have to compete fiercely for the remaining jobs. But will they really have to?

    This does not mean such specialists have become completely unnecessary. In reality, in-house specialists simply change the focus of their activities. Most of the IT infrastructure administration tasks are now on IaaS and IaaS providers are now the ones who need and are actively fighting for such specialists.

    Even when you do use third-party solution, that is what happens sometimes:

    When customers start using intermix.io for the first time, they can see the set-up and configuration of their Amazon Redshift cluster in the context of their queries and workflows.

    At that point, customers experience one common reaction: Knowing what we know now, how would we set up our Redshift cluster had we do it all over again?

    The answer is not that straightforward.

    However, sometimes it happens that migration to the cloud stimulates the company to strengthen and develop the IT department more, attracting new cloud employees. These people study the cloud ecosystem, analyze the trends and evaluate how the transfer of an application to the cloud will affect the company’s work. If the company is already working with the cloud, then cloud specialists are also exploring new features of the current platform and exploring services that will benefit a business in the future.

    Clouds Don’t Hold New Technologies

    Four years ago, IBM listed seven cloud technologies to help businesses. The list includes IaaS/PaaS, private/hybrid cloud, test and application development environments, big data processing and disaster recovery solutions, along with data storage and backup systems.

    These technologies served as a standard technology stack for a long time. It was all developed with the efforts of IaaS providers. Therefore, there was an opinion that the cloud ecosystem was finally formed and no other use cases will be foreseen in the near future.

    New Directions Still Appear: The blockchain technology was born in 2008, gained worldwide popularity 8 years later and came to the cloud about a year ago. Based on the virtual infrastructure, a new direction has started to develop: Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS). In this case, the client receives a virtual environment prepared for working with blockchain technology. Users can create their own applications on the blockchain (for example, for processing financial transactions) and run them in a secure virtual environment.

    Quantum Computers: the most recent, fresh cloud trend. The quantum machine uses qubits instead of bits we are used to. Unlike bits, qubits can take the value of zero and one at the same time. Thus, a quantum machine can be in several states at once. The more qubits a quantum computer has, the faster it performs the tasks assigned to it. Imagine how much faster it can brute-force passwords or simulate chemical reactions.

    Quantum computers already have practical applications. IBM has recently opened access to its 20-qubit developments via the IBM Q cloud platform. And this year, Alibaba partnered with the Chinese Academy of Sciences to deploy an 11-qubit quantum device in the cloud. Quantum Computing as-a-service (QCaaS) opened the way for experiments on the infrastructure of providers and proved the cloud industry can adapt to the emergence of new technologies.

    Another Trend Is Fogging or Fog Computing: IT-industry experts are trying to solve the problem of delay in transferring data to the cloud. In the case of fogging, server components are not located in the centralized data center, but on the periphery, close to the end-user devices.

    In such an architecture, a main, large cloud still remains but has additional networking and computing layers: cloud, fog, edge. The Cloud (cloud layer, primary) solves expensive tasks for periphery machines (edge layer, end-user): data analysis, system logging, etc. The fog layer does local calculations in real-time to generate reports and send them to the central hub. This architecture improves the performance of the entire infrastructure by significantly (up to 10 times) reducing the delay in data exchange.

    To Sum It Up on Cloud Myth-Busting

    So, as with everything, rushing into extremes doesn’t help. That’s what we figured out:

    1. Even though public cloud seems to be a mainstream option, private cloud infrastructure still makes sense for certain use cases.
    2. Most of the IT infrastructure administration tasks are now on IaaS and IaaS providers are now the ones who need and are actively fighting for Engineers i.e. market is more than far away from being oversaturated with specialists.
    3. Clouds don’t hold new technologies. Did anyone really believe this one anyway?

    — Dmitrii Borodin