Platform-as-a-Service will win the hearts of developers.
Developer-centric cloud infrastructure (IaaS) services have grown rapidly by providing high productivity environments for rapid application development and deployment. But platform-as-a-service (PaaS) represents a quantum leap in productivity and flexibility for application developers by further simplifying the development process. It does this by abstracting away virtual machines, operating systems and other extraneous details that are not germane to application development. For application transformation or brand new applications, PaaS is simply a more productive environment for developers. And that means less business for IaaS clouds targeting developers.
Further outages will drive awareness of differences in service quality.
Amazon's (AMZN) well-publicized 2011 outages were a wake-up call for many who had erroneously assumed that there was any kind of performance or uptime guarantee for a cloud service. The good news: there are hundreds of cloud providers who offer actual service level guarantees and who have engineered their cloud offerings so they're inherently more reliable.
This shatters the notion that cloud computing is a commodity like electricity. It isn't -- the details matter, and what you don't know can hurt your cloud application. There are qualities of a cloud service like high availability that are delivered through investment in infrastructure, people and processes -- and that's what differentiates providers. Clouds engineered with little or no investment in high availability may be superficially cheap, but you'll have to pay to devise, code and operate your own availability systems from scratch.
Organizations will continue to assume that private clouds have Hogwarts-like magical security protections.
Those familiar with Harry Potter know that the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is magically protected against those who would do its inhabitants ill. The same cannot be said for your organization's own four walls, but this seems to be the fundamental assumption applied to private clouds: the top objection to any kind of off-premises cloud is security.
All that matters are the actual security controls in place, and the processes to audit and verify that those controls are in fact there and functioning correctly. This is universally true, regardless of whether you own the walls, lease them, or they belong to a third party provider. Owning or leasing the walls doesn't gain you magical protection. Fundamentally, this is an irrational belief that mere facts cannot challenge, which is why it will persist until there is more widespread experience, comfort and acceptance of off-premises providers.
Mathew Lodge is Senior Director in VMware's Cloud Services group. Mathew has 20 years' diverse experience in cloud computing and product leadership. He has built compilers and distributed systems for projects like the International Space Station, helped connect six countries to the Internet for the first time, and managed a $630 million-plus router product line at Cisco. Prior to VMware, Mathew was Senior Director at Symantec, where he led go-to-market for its $1 billion-plus information management group.
