IDC estimates that global spending on services and infrastructure in the public cloud will reach $210 billion this year, 23.8% more than in 2018. Integrated into a multi-cloud strategy, PaaS and containers will foster the work of application developers.
Even if they haven't yet mastered all the subtleties of the cloud (including real costs and the distribution of security obligations), more and more companies are migrating to the cloud. Convinced by its advantages, they have taken enough distance to decide not to put "all their eggs in one basket", and therefore to adapt a multi-cloud strategy.
Multicloud is a deployment model that involves the use of multiple services from different providers. One of the benefits of this strategy is to mitigate the risks of service unavailability and data leakage. The aim is to take advantage of the best the cloud has to offer, to help your business grow.
At the same time, the container market also has a bright future ahead of it. According to 451 Research, it is set to reach $2.7 billion this year. This interest can be explained by the fact that these "microservices" enable greater agility. Applications are deployed and updated in a continuous cycle. A single container can be modified. A significant flexibility compared to a complete redeployment.
Fewer system resources
Containers (open source project Kubernetes or Dockers, to name but the best-known) offer a dual advantage. Firstly, developers can benefit from a greater degree of "portability" to move software from one environment to another.
This portability allows them to test their applications on multiple operating systems to see if it makes a difference to the results. If an application fails during testing, it only affects a specific container as opposed to the entire OS.
Secondly, for operators and CIOs, containers can deliver significant savings by using fewer system resources than traditional virtualization (because containers share a kernel, whereas virtualized systems share hardware). That said, almost all container deployments are carried out on fleets of VMs...
Beware, however, of an overly lax security policy. A VM isolates instances from each other by not allowing the guest OS to communicate with the host. This barrier does not exist in containers!
The container/multicloud combination is also beneficial in terms of future innovation solutions for existing applications. Containers accelerate innovation, DevOps implementations and agility in application development.
PaaS : Gaining in efficiency
Finally, the future of the cloud certainly lies in PaaS. This market is expected to reach $20 billion in revenues by the end of this year, and exceed $34 billion by 2022. And this trend has been underestimated. In 2012, Gartner declared that PaaS market revenues would reach nearly $3 billion by 2016...
One of the reasons for the shift to PaaS is diversity. Gartner divides this market into 21 segments. But 90% of providers offer only one of these segments. There are over 550 offerings, from more than 360 suppliers. Here too, the multicloud/PaaS combination will enable organizations to gain in efficiency. The arguments in favor of PaaS go back several years. Today, this solution has established itself as the basic technology on which a "modern" company relies for software development.
Adopting a PaaS platform enables developers to work with an application-centric abstraction, allowing the enterprise to focus on business requirements without significant changes to the architectural approach of its application (or at least without any changes compared to the serverless model).
Data fragmentation
These three solutions confirm the benefits of multi-cloud. But Gartner warns companies to beware. Working with multiple providers can easily complicate cloud management and contribute to higher costs. What's more, the fragmentation of data between different suppliers reduces the benefits that companies are hoping to achieve.
This is shown by a survey of 900 CIOs (in Australia, France, Germany, Japan, the UK and the USA) by Cohesity (a provider of data backup and management solutions), published in June 2019. More than 9 out of 10 managers believed - when they began their migration to the public cloud - that it would simplify their operations, increase agility, reduce costs and give them a better understanding of their data.
In fact, the majority (91%) feel that the promises of the public cloud have not been kept. The main cause: their data is highly fragmented within and between public clouds. Worse still, they believe it could become almost impossible to manage in the long term.
