CloudSight is 20/20: ECS 2020 Cloud Predictions

This trend of leveraging multi-cloud, or multi-cloud service providers, started a couple of years ago to help businesses avert the risk of vendor lock-in. Although CSPs have matured in terms of both offerings and organizational stability, businesses will continue with the trend of exploring the possibility of storing data in multiple clouds. They will also continue to explore the use of multiple clouds for disaster recovery and business continuity. While organizations realize that this is an expensive undertaking due to the need for professionals with multi-cloud knowledge, the year 2020 will continue with this trend.

In the spirit of risk aversion, more and more organizations are leaning towards a hybrid cloud. There has been a tremendous interest in VMWare Cloud on AWS/Azure as an extension of data center into the cloud with a single management tool. VMware Cloud is valid for most workloads due to its hyper-converged architecture for deploying, managing, and scaling the same. This is actually quite beneficial for organizations who want to control the pace of their cloud migration and/or who want to leverage cloud compute while keeping their data local to their data centers.

With the need for efficiency of shared services and requirements for portability, containerization momentum will gain more traction than ever this year. The primary reason for this explosive growth is the increasing level of comfort that organizations have with containerization, and the availability of management and orchestration tools from the CSPs. This trend will also have an impact on the overall ecosystem of container vendors, providers, and supporting tools with additional acquisitions and mergers. IDC forecasts a five-year CAGR of 79% for enterprise container instances, with over 1.8 billion enterprise containers by 2021.

Concurrent to the growth of containerization, Kubernetes (K8s) will see greater adoption and usage as the open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized workloads. Availability of Kubernetes from all CSPs—AWS ECS and EKS, Azure AKS, IBM Cloud Kubernetes services, and Google GKE—offers users the flexibility to manage containers with a promise of lower cost. With the growth of K8s usage, CSPs will continue the trend of Kubernetes-based offerings through native development or acquisition of more container-focused startups.

In the early part of the last decade, we observed a unilateral trend towards the public cloud, but soon enough organizations realized that one size does not fit all. To accommodate the unique requirements of diverse workloads, CSPs have responded to an increased interest in hybrid cloud by offering private cloud services. Microsoft’s Azure Stack and AWS Outposts are prime examples of such service offerings. These services offer organizations the ability to extend AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to customer premises. These offerings enable customers to build and run their workload in their premises leveraging the same CSP APIs as cloud. 2020 will see a faster adoption of these private cloud offerings than any time before.

Organizations have grown a good appetite for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), with cloud AI/ML services samplers in the past two years, and are gearing towards a full meal in 2020. CSPs now offer more pre-trained AI services for language, sound, and vision recommendations and forecasting. AI/ML cloud services will see a higher adoption in 2020 for production workloads including chatbots development, advanced text analytics, vision services, sales recommendations, and hiring decisions. Additionally, we will continue to see new offerings of advanced features from cloud providers, making it easier for developers to leverage AI/ML services with limited knowledge of data science.

As they embark upon new business needs, organizations are starting with cloud native development with confidence. CSPs now offer enhanced capabilities and toolsets for easier SecDevOps pipelines that are allowing organizations to leverage the same for completely native development in the cloud, hence leveraging the true benefits of cloud including better scalability, increased flexibility, and higher availability.

Continuing with the trend, organizations will continue to find ways for more cost-effective cloud utilization. Organizations are becoming smarter about usage with even simpler techniques (see our blog on cloud cost-saving tips) and will continue to keep a focus on cost savings. Meanwhile, CSPs continue to drop their service pricing and offer flexibility of purchase options. For example, AWS recently announced an even more flexible pricing model, AWS Savings Plans, to reduce prices on Amazon EC2 instances usage regardless of instance family, size, OS, tenancy or AWS region. Cloud savings plans are also applicable to AWS Fargate usage.

Increased cloud presence, especially for production workloads, demands effective cloud governance that ranges from automated cloud provisioning, effective designs, proactive monitoring, efficient backups, and smarter workforce. Even the early adopters are looking back to ensure that a complete and comprehensive cloud governance is in place to make the best use of cloud technologies. Each CSP offers multiple services to aid in cloud governance and provides models for effective cloud governance. Additionally, The Open Group provides a Cloud Computing Governance Framework to support the cloud governance wave.

Cloud offerings primarily started as IaaS. As CSP services matured, PaaS and SaaS offerings came into play. In the same tune, cloud consumers with a perception of a better control focused more on using infrastructure services. As organizations realize the maturity and security of cloud services, they have not only started trusting cloud services but also realized that organizations can make more effective use of their workforce by focusing on workloads rather than managing infrastructure. This year, hence, there will be a push for PaaS and SaaS both from the provider and consumer side. Bloomberg Government projects the SaaS spending to reach $3.3 billion in FY 2020.

Security is quintessential to any cloud adoption. As long as cloud exists, there will be cyber threats. It is not a matter of if but when and how a workload will be attacked. With myriad new cloud services, use of multiple clouds, hybrid cloud, and serverless computing, cloud security will and should remain a critical pillar of any design. The security demands will be further complicated due to hybrid and multi-cloud requirements. As bad actors catch up to exploit security vulnerabilities in cloud workloads (please see Cloud Security Breaches in 2019), cloud ecosystem will continue to provide new security offerings for data security, workloads security, and automated ways to continually comply with regulations and security practices.

As organizations move from simple techniques of cost savings like turning VMs on and off as needed, there will be a second layer of cost savings including picking the right size VMs. As organizations moved into cloud, they were picking VMs by using a ballpark number and by matching VMs against on-prem usage. With experience and monitoring capabilities from CSPs, organizations are realizing that they can make better use of cloud by fine tuning and right sizing VMs. Both Azure and AWS offer tools to perform right-sizing analysis and detailed recommendations for VMs using their native tools like AWS EC2 Right Sizing and Azure Migrate.

A shortage of cloud practitioners, architects, developers, and administrators will continue this year as well. Although more universities and colleges are offerings courses, certificates, and degrees in cloud computing, the demand in the market outpaces the supply. In a report from OpsRamp, an IT operations platform provider, 94% of the survey respondents admitted to experiencing difficulties in finding the right candidates for their cloud projects. To meet the challenges, organizations have started and will continue to reskill and retrain current employees with cloud skills. This is a great strategy to complement external hiring with internal training and reskilling for cloud environments.

Multiple reports, RightScale 2018 State of the Cloud, Current 2018 Report, and Cloud Foundry 2018, show a consistent growth of over 75% in serverless computing. With AWS Lambda, and Azure Functions, organizations started experimenting in the last couple of years. As the capabilities of these serverless technologies increased, not only consumers are beginning to use them for production workloads, but also the CSPs are creating new services by leveraging serverless technologies to build PaaS and SaaS offerings. In 2020, the next wave of PaaS will be built on serverless architecture.

As organizations cloud experience grows, their appetite for community specific clouds has evolved proportionally. CSPs are responding by creating or adding regions to meet the needs of commercial, government, and secret data levels with appropriate security controls and compliance levels. AWS launched its second GovCloud Region in 2018, and both AWS and Azure are offering government-only and Department of Defense (DoD) regions to comply with data sensitivity needs.

While community specific needs continue to grow, more and more organizations are also realizing that their security- and data-level needs can also be met with the public cloud regions. Additionally, with more confidence in cloud services, organizations are embracing cloud for their initial workloads, migrating more production workloads into cloud, or natively developing in cloud. All these factors are contributing to an increase in the number of workloads in public cloud. BGOV, referencing ITDashboard.gov FY 2020 Capital Planning Guidance, states that “272 IT budget lines items worth $3.8 billion are migration some or all components to the cloud in FY 2020.”

As cities, infrastructure, and billions of devices are becoming smarter each day to comply with citizens, law enforcement, and consumers demands, IoT services needs will continue to grow. AWS and Azure currently offer a myriad of IoT services in the categories of device software, device connectivity & control, and analytics. The number of connected devices is expected to explore in the coming year. Combined with edge computing and 5G networks, this trend will continue to grow both in US as well as internationally to make our homes, offices, streets, and cities smarter.

With higher demand for public and community cloud, CSPs will add more regions in all parts of the world for their cloud services. Currently AWS has 18 regions, Azure has 55 regions, and Google has 20 regions. Each of these CSPs will be adding regions in 2020 to meet these workload demands. AWS has already announced four new regions, and this trend will continue to grow for public as well as government/DoD regions.

As the area of cloud technologies and governance is maturing, organizations have realized that traditional roles either need to be redefined and/or new roles need to be added to their organizational structure to better leverage and manage cloud capabilities. What started as cloud architects, for example, has broken down into cloud architects, cloud engineers, cloud developers, cloud administrators, and cloud PMs. Similarly, other roles could include cloud database specialist, cloud security specialist, DevOps engineer, cloud financial manager, and cloud operations specialist.

5G is 100x faster than the existing 4G LTE network, and getting a lot of attention from major CSPs. While Microsoft announced a partnership with AT&T in Nov. 2019, Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg joined AWS CEO Andy Jassy on the stage during AWS re:Invent 2019 to announce a partnership between Verizon and AWS to bring cloud computing closer to its 5G network edge. CSPs will adjust their services and capabilities to better leverage 5G capabilities. AWS has already announced a new service called Wavelength to deliver technology from AWS closer to users’ devices with a single-digit millisecond latency to users.