Current cloud computing trends
Currently, 71% of organizations have its data located on systems that are physically on-premise and 52% of organizations had most recent project implementations performed on-premise (McKendrick, 2019). A survey from the same group shows that a total of 44% have deployed projects with a cloud provider as part of a hybrid architecture.
Managed containers, or application containers, are becoming integral in an organization’s portfolio. As of 2018, the increasing awareness of Kubernetes in nearly most conferences is a clear indicator of the adoption of managed containers inside an enterprises’ architecture (Tsidulko, 2019). These containers allow organizations to create reusable artifacts that can easily manage code-base and deploy it across any platform quickly with little to know need to administer, deploy, or maintain the underlying servers and infrastructure the code runs on. The large cloud providers have released their versions of managed container services: Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service, Microsoft’s Azure Kubernetes Service, and Google’s Google Kubernetes Engine.
Another major trend and battle emerging between cloud service providers is the offering of Artificial Intelligence services to further drive insights from data estates to increase ROI and drive improved services and offerings. Project portfolios are seeing an infusion of AI services such as chatbots, predictive analytics, voice-enabled user interfaces, recommendations, automated security, and machine learning frameworks (Tsidulko, 2019).
Personal Experiences
In my career role as a Cloud Solution Architect, the most common question I get asked is: “how are businesses migrating to the cloud from on-premise resources?” While the answer is not always straight-forward based on the goals of the organization, my response fits in a pattern of answers. These patterns include lift and shift current applications and data storage to the cloud with little to no changes, lift and re-architecture by deploying applications to use cloud services or start new workloads from scratch. There is no one solution that works for everyone – instead it requires an honest assessment of an organization’s policies, goals, culture, skillsets, budget, architecture, and governance body to adequately propose solution architectures.
Generally, lift and re-architecture projects are the most rigorous and time consuming given the level of complexity in a businesses’ infrastructure’s code. To begin cloud migration projects, IT and business will collaborate to create a list of cloud projects and then identify priorities to shift business applications to the cloud solution based on immediate solutions required. Due to the scope of these projects, they usually require contractors, vendors, consultants, and internal IT teams to coordinate and work together to strategize and formulate plans to assess, migrate, test, and promote applications to the cloud.
One major constraint that makes it difficult for managing a cloud portfolio is the limited transferability between cloud providers. This transferability can be known as portability, which is a measure to assess the impact of moving IT resources and associated data between different providers (Erl, Mahmood, & Puttini, 2013).
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