What To Expect From Cloud Computing In 2013

The idea of cloud is finally shaping into reality. The beginning was of course buying, collecting storage and making enterprises believe in it. Now is the time when finally, giant companies have understood the current computing demand, and are ready to move on to the cloud. The companies that are in charge of providing cloud services have upgraded their applications and have started using practical hybrid models to make sure that cloud experience is full. Now let’s have a look at the future:

1.      Public Cloud vs. Enterprise Demands

More than a thousand fortunate companies are testing and building in Amazon’s public cloud. But, very few run real applications there. So, when it comes to hardcore applications for finance and health area, most probably, no company will show anything in the public cloud.

And this is a big trouble for Amazon. Though a number of promises and claims can be witnessed from various companies (read Cloud Velocity), how much they can deliver is still a question. One thing is for sure, a company that is able to make public cloud a safe entity will surely earn loads of money. Until then—veterans like VMware and Microsoft should strive to keep up their legacy in the software.

2.      HP in Trouble

Cloud computing makes hardware branding outdated and that is why, Dell, EMC, HP and others are struggling hard to keep up their relevance in the new scenario.

HP is the talk of the town in this regard with CEO’s Meg Whitman promising a huge turnaround to investors. But HP seems to be nowhere, especially after the management crisis and new dubious possessions like Autonomy, which was supposed to make HP credible, but unfortunately, it has done nothing.

Anyway, HP has also launched a OpenStack base cloud system. Now let’s see how many customers HP can attract.

3.      Independent OpenStack

Rackspace has left OpenStack and now it is independent. The only concern is how OpenStack will manage alone with competitors like Amazon Web service (public cloud) and Cloud Stack, Eucalyptus and Open Nebula (open sources).

2012 was crucial for OpenStack as HP, Internap, Red Hat, and Rackspace all came up with their own OpenStack-based clouds. And there are others also ready to jump on the bandwagon like Cloudscaling’s Amazon and Google API-compliant private cloud.

One must not forget that cloud computing is still novice and anyone can emerge as the real player, anytime. Right now—nothing is certain about cloud mechanism.

4.      Infrastructure Breaks the Wall

Data center does not mean just a computer as suggested by Google, years ago. Now, a data center is more about web services due to Spanner database that syncs content among five data centers. In short, data centers in today’s world are the networks connecting them.

Netflix; broadband traffic suppliers, has realized this and pushed its network to edge through a content delivery network. Facebook is trying to do the same thing and in the near future, we will see more companies extending their networks to the limits.

5.      Software-defined Networking

Software-defined networking was the big news of 2012 but we also saw software-defined storage and software-defined data centers. The idea was to amalgamate networking, storage and data centers as you cannot liberate any application, without getting hold of its networking and storage.