Referencing Wikipedia:
The Pythia , commonly known as the Oracle of Delphi, was the priestess at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, located on the slopes of Mount Parnassus. The Pythia was widely credited for her prophecies inspired by Apollo.
Amazon Web Service’s (AWS) first user conference in November 2012 was over-subscribed and sold out. Given that the company offers all the infrastructure you need (and then some) in a public cloud: Linux and Windows instances, databases, storage, elastic load balancers, messaging…. it has become apparent that Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) has gained broad appeal. 2012 also saw the arrival of the Google Compute Cloud, a similar offering from Microsoft, and the launch of HP’s public cloud – based on OpenStack – now offer customers several options to add to the existing Terremark, Joyent, Rackspace, DELL and others for Infrastructure as a Service choices. Sing the song of lower costs and commoditized services, and consumers have several choices. The private cloud appears to be a close fight between VMware vCloud and Microsoft Private Cloud for customers seeking commercial offerings while OpenStack becomes a formidable player over CloudStack and Eucalyptus in the open-source offerings. Clearly enterprise use of IaaS has arrived.
So what does 2013 hold for IaaS?
- Not everything belongs in the cloud. Developers should have a hands-on grasp of cloud APIs. Just like cloud is not virtualization, nor is cloud simply hosted services, applications in the cloud need to adapt to the cloud and developers must write apps that best leverage cloud platforms to enable new functionality.
- Cloud + mobile = 1. Enterprises won’t want to poke firewall holes in their datacenters to allow mobile apps to access data, so these apps will live in the cloud. Backend as a Service (BaaS) will be required for mobile.
- Where is my cloud SLA? Adopting the cloud is a shared responsibility between provider and consumer, so applications should protect themselves.
- Cloud costs will be closely scrutinized to determine the true value of the cloud, keep a look out for companies that can illustrate these costs (CloudSyn is one example).
- Year of the hybrid cloud – enterprises will choose between vCloud, Microsoft, or OpenStack/Cloudstack offerings and burst into the public cloud for shared workloads.