2010: The Year of the Cloud Platform

For the 3rd installment of our webinar recap series, we dive into what the future holds for cloud computing. In particular, will look at the role of platform-as-a-service in the broader cloud ecosystem. In particular, will 2010 be “the year of PaaS?” Read on for more about why platform-level services will be hot in 2010, and who we felt would be the big winners this year as the focus shifts from the infrastructure to the platform

2010: The Year of Platform as a Service

Michael: 2010 is going to be the year of the platform layer. If we look back at the predictions in 2008 going into 2009, people were getting excited about cloud. People were talking very much about virtualization. People were talking very much about renting resources and tying them all together.

That was great, and we saw that come together in 2009, a lot of excitement out of Amazon and VMware with their various solutions for public and private clouds. A lot of users are coming. When we talk to our customers and various users around the country, I hear a lot of application developers come and say, “But wait how do I tie all of this together? What tools are there for me to take advantage of this new paradigm?” That’s really the core of this prediction.

The platform tools are there. We have our platform tools that assist developers to put together these large applications so they can focus on their value add. There are frameworks such as Hadoop where with just writing a couple of functions of code, you get this massive platform for churning through terabytes or petabytes of data across your infrastructure.
These are the tools. This is the next tier up on the cloud technology stack. This is what people are going to be looking for. I think it’s interesting that if you look back in 2009, you see this come. I see two big points that really drive this.

First of all, there was the VMware acquisition of SpringSource. VMware is still all about the private clouds for tying together your resources and being able to control them dynamically, but you could tell they saw that, to them, the VM is still just a black box that they manage.

They really don’t have the insight into what the application is doing, and they needed those tools to go one tier up. So, here they look at SpringSource. They have more control on runtimes. They have the Hyperic monitoring system to see what’s going on inside the VM, and they can control it at a tighter level.
We talked about standards for 2009. Here at the end of 2009, I’ve seen the first talk about not standards at the infrastructure layer, but standards at the platform layer, about how to try to keep these tools together. So it’s time. People need to move up that stack.

The masses of developers don’t want to be distributed computing experts. They want a tool set to assist them on top of this tremendous infrastructure we’ve built, and I really see it all coming together with another round of great tools for application developers to build upon.

Sam: So, this is almost a standard question that I’m starting to ask. Winners, losers who benefits from this shift? Who’s put out from this shift? What about the big guys?

Michael: Yeah. I get this question a lot. There are people who lock into just one technology stack, and those are going to be the losers here. There are those that have batch tools. There are those that think that cloud is just about virtualization. There are those that look at pure Scylla. Anybody who locks into just that single tier is going to be a loser here because it is the unification, and thereby extension, of a lot of these efforts that are really going to allow the winners to evolve.

I’ve been talking I was at a cloud camp just recently and developers were starting to ask me about, “I’m an expert in ESB; I’m an expert in operations management. What is this next tier? What is the paradigm shift? Because I don’t want to get left behind.” So that’s where the winners will separate themselves.

Those that are willing to take that slight shift and realize that building an app for the cloud is very much like building an old app, but not exactly like building an old app. Those are going to be the winners as we come forward here, through this shift.

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Stay tuned for our next installment, “Data in the Cloud”. See you then!