(Pixabay Photo)
Welcome to the first edition of Mostly Cloudy in 2020! This week’s roundup of everything you need to know about cloud computing will review how far we’ve come with a few predictions for the new year.
This Week in Cloud: Ten Years Burning Down the Road
Google’s “custom range” search settings are a time machine. “Cloud computing is poised to win the title of most popular, and populist, buzzword of 2009,” declared a Computerworld article from late 2009 that attempted to give traditional IT managers — flummoxed by that “cloud” thing that their developers keep spending money on despite all these perfectly good servers they gave them —TT a clearer picture of cloud computing at the end of the first decade of the 21st century.
That’s the thing about tech buzzwords: some of those terms beaten to death by overzealous marketing departments (that is perhaps redundant) actually turn into concepts that change the world. Cloud computing was invented in the prior decade, but over the last ten years, it emerged as the technology and economic force that has reshaped enterprise computing.
Two posts last week from ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley, fulfilling the end-of-year content plan that just about every media organization trots out around the holidays, were a good reminder of just how far the cloud has come. The posts focused on Microsoft’s evolution into a leading cloud vendor and the memories of the people who engineered that shift during a time when Microsoft seemed like it was all out of ideas.
Microsoft wasted a lot of time before embracing cloud computing, although arguably not as much as Google. Still, both companies find themselves in heated competition for enterprise tech dollars in early 2020, far behind cloud pioneer Amazon Web Services but thankful to have established a strong presence in a market that is still growing at a healthy clip.
That Computerworld article actually provided a pretty good blueprint for how hybrid cloud strategies would become top-of-mind for cloud companies at the end of the decade: AWS now sells a rack of servers. It advised those IT managers to keep their most important software on their own servers while evaluating which types of internal applications would make the most sense on cloud servers, which is exactly how large enterprise companies are thinking about cloud computing in late 2019.
AWS CEO Andy Jassy speaks at re:Invent 2019. (AWS Photo)
I won’t even attempt to predict what cloud computing will look like in 2030. But here are a few predictions for 2020:
Edge computing becomes a real thing. Microsoft has been banging this drum for a couple of years now, and now that AWS has made a move expect more interest in really distributed computing. A different ZDNet article suggests that edge computing could actually revitalize suburban malls, and there would be something perversely hilarious about Amazon.com killing suburban mall real estate companies over the last decade only for AWS to resurrect them.
Microsoft finally discloses Azure revenue. Microsoft’s cloud transformation efforts won’t be complete until it is ready to put Azure in the same category as the rest of its revenue-generating crown jewels. As revenue from the JEDI contract starts to hit the books in 2020, it will finally be time to share its progress.
Cloud market share numbers won’t change meaningfully — if at all. Much of the mainstream business coverage of cloud computing is focused on the horse race, which is easier for a lot of reporters and editors to understand than the actual market forces. The tell is their breathless coverage of the “cloud wars,” implying that if Microsoft and Google do these things, they’ll topple AWS. But barring some catastrophic event, it’s simply not going to happen in the foreseeable future: enterprise sales cycles are long and growing longer, three-year contracts are becoming standard, and the overall market is growing fast enough to support several vibrant players. AWS will only give up its lead if it makes a colossal strategic mistake, and it hasn’t made all that many minor mistakes over the last decade.
The end of the calendar year is always a time for reflection on the past and consideration of the future, even if it’s really just another Wednesday. What’s perhaps most amazing about this seismic shift in computing is just how much more of the story remains to be told, and how much was accomplished in just ten short years.
And Now, A Word…
Over the holiday break The New Stack published a contribution from yours truly on one of the more interesting (and jam-packed) sessions I observed at KubeCon in San Diego last November. The U.S. Air Force made a huge bet on Kubernetes and Istio as part of its IT modernization strategy over the last few years, and Chief Software Officer Nicholas Chaillan walked attendees through some of the basics.
We went with “Kubernetes on an F-16” as the headline for obvious reasons, but while the 45-day challenge to get Kubernetes running on ancient hardware used by a jet designed in the 1970s is kind of fascinating, it wasn’t the biggest thing I learned from his presentation. This deployment strategy — which Chaillan is rolling out across other parts of the U.S. Department of Defense — was designed to run on either AWS or Microsoft Azure, giving the military a lot of flexibility heading into the JEDI contact.
Around the Cloud
Oracle copied Amazon’s API—was that copyright infringement? (Ars Technica)
This court battle has dragged on for a decade and will be heard before the Supreme Court in March, in what could be a very important ruling for the future of software development. There will be much more to say about that over the coming months, but this is kind of hilarious: Oracle sued Google claiming it improperly used its Java APIs while appearing to improperly (according to its definition of how APIs should be used) use AWS’s S3 API.
Microsoft paid $26 billion for LinkedIn, then mostly left it alone—and CEO Jeff Weiner is good with that (CNBC)
LinkedIn and GitHub might go down as the most consequential acquisitions of the Satya Nadella era at Microsoft, and not just because of their price tags. In both cases, the companies have been more or less operating on their own, and while that might change over time Jeff Weiner is confident: “Satya has made good on every single thing we talked about prior to the acquisition,” he told CNBC.
Why Facebook should take on Amazon, Microsoft in the cloud in 2020 (Yahoo Finance)
Now that’s a prediction! I don’t think it will happen this year, but I shared my own thoughts on this oft-rumored move a few months ago, and Wall Street analysts are starting to understand how lucrative this market could be if the business of monetizing disinformation takes a turn for the worse.
Amazon, Google, Microsoft: Who had the best year in cloud in 2019? (The Register)
With all due respect to El Reg, easily the most unique and pointed voice in the enterprise tech media cohort, this is the downside of year-end market-share focused analysis. The answer is “all of them, kinda.”
An IBM CTO tells us about three open source projects with the power to change the world (Business Insider)
I’m not sure how an IBM executive was allowed to give an interview on this topic without mentioning Istio, an IBM-backed open-source project that is getting real traction in the market, but... The projects mentioned are focused on quantum computing, blockchain, and machine learning, and bonus points if you can guess which one made the laugh the hardest.
VMware completes $2.7 billion Pivotal acquisition (Techcrunch)
VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger (VMware Photo)
No one expected anything else, and these two have been part of the same corporate family forever, but it’s a milestone nonetheless. The combined organization is primed to clean up if hybrid cloud strategies remain en vogue over the next few years, although it might take some time for their strategy to come together. (Disclosure: I’ve done some consulting work for Pivotal over the last few weeks.)
Ghosts in the Clouds: Inside China’s Major Corporate Hack (The Wall Street Journal)
All security breaches are scary but the details of this one will keep folks up at night. Chinese hackers had access to the servers of a ton of smaller cloud players like HPE, but don’t appear to have breached the defenses of the Big Three.
Seed investors are favoring enterprise startups, and other conclusions from analyzing Y Combinator’s investing history (Eric Feng)
The New York Times touched on this recently, but investors burned by the business models of consumer startups are looking more closely at enterprise startups, which take longer to develop but tend to have stronger long-term potential. This has uncorked a surge of enterprise startup activity, which keeps big players on their toes and presents a big opportunity for startup accelerators like Y Combinator.
A decade in review in tech (Cindy Sridharan)
Cindy is a great Twitter follow if you’re into the techier side of the cloud, and this post is an excellent overview of some of the most important developments that hit enterprise computing over the last decade. Her take on containers is particularly interesting, given the degree to which that format has taken over product management and marketing over the last few years.
How to lose a monopoly: Microsoft, IBM and anti-trust (Ben Evans)
I’ve never understood the tech industry’s disdain for learning its own history, so caught up in The Disruption. Unlike that terrible New York Times article about the supposed power of AWS, this post presents a much better way to think about how AWS will start to exert its power over the next few years, and how it might eventually architect its own slow demise.
I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left. (Ross LaJeunesse)
Was Google always a megalomaniac company with a perky image? This is an excellent overview of one man’s journey through Google as it has evolved, and notable for cloud readers: Google Cloud is aggressively pursuing business with some of the less savory characters in the modern world, including Saudi Arabia.