Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!
Here are the blogs we’ve posted this week:
With that, onto this week’s news:
Cloud architecture must accommodate rapid change
David Linthicum, InfoWorld, Jan. 25, 2022
“Many people think cloud computing automatically provides the best agility as well as cost optimization. The reality is that nothing is automatic. You must build your systems to accommodate rapid change, cloud or not. In many cases, it will be as hard to integrate rapid change features into existing cloud systems as it is to upgrade more traditional legacy systems. Without these features, the business will die the death of a thousand cuts as the disruptors take over. You only need to look at ride sharing, home sharing, and entertainment to see how it happens.
Today we must plan ahead for change. Any architecture, cloud or no cloud, needs to be able to accommodate change. Remember, although a system can be optimized for an initial instance in time, that doesn’t mean it’s a good architecture ongoing. It’s no longer enough to create a system that works today. It must also accommodate rapid changes tomorrow and the next day.
The ability to accommodate change or to be more agile is not new. Both SOA (service-oriented architecture) and cloud computing encouraged architects to provide the most agility. It’s no surprise that an architecture won’t provide rapid change capabilities unless you design for it. When you layer in more systems on top of a design that does not easily accommodate rapid change, you’ll have more layers of problems.”
SUSE CTO: Inside (Underneath) Cloud-Native Deployment Realities
Adrian Bridgwater, Forbes, Feb. 1, 2022
“Technology cadence changed. As we all know, the global pandemic drove governments, enterprise organizations, non-profits and just about every other working group on the planet through a period of rapid disruption. In this time of (often enforced) innovation, people have learned to strip back their previous notion of timescales; what used to take a year can sometimes now take a month, what used to take a month often now happens in days… and so on. The fallout of this effect for many is a new approach to technology. Specifically, it is a new approach to embracing cloud-native platforms and the technology tools and services that they deliver.
But as fast as Cloud Services Providers (CSPs) tell us they can ‘spin up’ cloud volumes, the application of cloud-native is rarely plug-and-play. The challenge isn’t down to can you buy some cloud – yes, you can, it’s there. The real challenge is shaped by an organization’s ability to shoulder cloud-native with an underpinning approach to IT infrastructure that is as flexible as the shiny cloud promise that we’re all being sold on. Organizations can no longer afford the luxury of working to 90, 60, or even 30 days to get new capabilities to market after they have been developed. Delays at that level expose firms to competitive market risks, in a very raw and very real way. There was a time when these lead times were the norm due to the complexity and manual processes used for IT infrastructure deployment. But things are changing.”
The forces behind enterprise cloud spending trends
David Linthicum, InfoWorld, Jan. 21, 2022
“The cloud will continue to experience consistent growth during the next 10 years. However, the speed of that growth will change over time, and it will change for different reasons. It’s easy for analysts in larger enterprises to rely on historically accurate assumptions to predict future cloud spending, but those assumptions may prove unsound going forward. New forces are at work that will drive the velocity of cloud spending quarter to quarter, and most of those forces are not yet well understood.
Most enterprises spend money on cloud to react to reduced IT spending. Or, more frequently, cloud gets introduced as a strategic investment. The pandemic has highlighted the strategic advantages of cloud computing because cloud can reduce or eliminate many of the risks around the pandemic. For example, cloud can remove applications and data from enterprise data centers that were vulnerable to quarantine restrictions that companies experienced early in the pandemic. Later, more applicable to 2021, cloud spending reflected a strategic need. The typical example is cloud’s ability to drive more innovation directly related to the business and its ability to do it faster.The cloud will continue to grow, although the rate of its growth will vary according to shifts in market priorities, as well as enterprise priorities.The trick is to understand how these shifts relate to actual cloud spending and why. We’re making too many assumptions about how the moving parts influence spending. Many historically accurate assumptions will no longer hold true. It’s time to update our yardsticks with today’s emerging cloud markers.”
