Looking Back at the Year in Cloud Computing

Just about a year ago, I published my 2014 cloud computing predictions. It’s been an amazing year in cloud computing, with a few of these highlights:

• Amazon Web Services continues to grow and innovate. At its November Reinvent conference, the more than 13,000 attendees learned about its many new services, including new Lambda, as well as new instance types (and Intel appeared, talking about how it had designed a new, highest-performing-ever chip just for Amazon).
• Microsoft, charging from behind, seems to be making up lost ground, and, according to all reports, is now a significant player, leveraging its capability to deliver a homogenous hybrid cloud offering.
• Google made it clear that it wants its place in the cloud universe, using price slashing (historically the tool of a new player trying to squeeze its way into a market) as its weapon.
• Both HP and IBM brought new public offerings to market (Helion and BlueMix, respectively), indicating they aren’t planning to forfeit the public cloud computing market by staying stuck in their legacy on-premises businesses (although, to be noted, both provide on-premises solutions that are compatible with their public offerings, thereby providing customer value through consistency and portability).
• The OpenStack Foundation held two Summits with rapidly growing attendance, indicating high level of both vendor and user interest. While OpenStack the platform is still maturing, it’s clear that, as an industry, we have chosen OpenStack as the only meaningful nonproprietary software platform for operating cloud infrastructures.
• More generally, cloud computing is continuing its journey to becoming *the* de facto enterprise computing platform. It’s still early in this journey, but I’m no longer hearing skepticism about cloud’s benefits, as I did even two years ago. Today, the industry — both vendors and users — is trying to figure out how to best extract value from cloud. The discussion about whether cloud computing is real, however, is done. It’s obvious it’s real; now the question is how, not why (although, sadly, there is still too much fixation on what, as in “what is cloud computing,” as though a definition needs to be fixed before getting on with the job).

Given these developments, I thought it would be worthwhile to revisit my 2014 predictions, both as a perhaps-humbling effort to evaluate my foresight, but also to measure how the torrid pace of innovation in the cloud market has supported or outstripped what I expected to see during this year.

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