(转)State of the Cloud 2017

原文链接：https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/state-cloud-2017-part-i-a-rathinasabapathy

In Cloud Computing technology, we have seen the emergence, convergence and divergence of various technical concepts and tools since its inception. The cycle for emergence, convergence and divergence has really shortened as the technology innovation is happening at a rapid speed due to Opensource and start-up culture. Technology may be ahead of the market sometimes but it faces the reality check and realizes its gap in the maturity during the adoption. The Cloud Computing Technology has matured in some areas and maturing in some areas. The adoption is on the rise more than ever. The next stage after maturity is standardization, interoperability, compatibility, optimization, governance and operational efficiency. The year 2017 for Cloud Computing will mostly focus on these lines. This blog outlines the current state of some the key areas in Cloud Computing.

Cloud Service Providers

Cloud Service Provider market has matured and settling down with four big names Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine and IBM Softlayer. There were too many Cloud Service providers and there was a huge competition for market penetration but some of them like HP Public Cloud, Cisco Public Cloud realized it is not their area and closed their Public Cloud offering. Rackspace moved to their strong hold of Managed Support rather than a competitor to AWS and it was acquired by Apollo Global Management.

As per the survey, the market share by the Cloud Service providers are AWS – 31%, Azure 9%, GCE-4%, IBM Softlayer – 4%, Others 52%

The biggest shake up was that AWS, the leading public cloud service provider announced partnership with leading Virtualization player VMware to offer VMWare in AWS platform.

The data center service providers changed their mind set and no longer see Public Cloud Service providers as their competition. They started reselling Cloud Infrastructure from these service providers along with their Colo or Managed Private Cloud or infrastructure by providing a value added interconnect between these infrastructures.

Cloud Platforms

There were lot of choices of Cloud platforms for powering Private or Public Clouds earlier. Lot of consolidation happened in this area like HP acquired Eucalyptus, Oracle acquired Nimbula, Citrix acquired Cloudstack and later Opensource it under Apache.

Openstack is standing tall and undoubtedly emerged as a leading Opensource platform for powering Private Cloud. However, the public clouds powered by Openstack have not made a bigger impact.

Gone are the days when the OpenStack eco-system was dominated by niche, small players. It is now largely dominated by big players such as Red Hat, IBM, Dell EMC etc. Small niche players like eNovance, Metacloud, Pistoncloud, Bluebox have all been acquired.

VMWare still has the largest market capture for Virtualization. Has tried multiple versions and flavours for their private cloud vCloud but none of them was as promising as their earlier solution so most of the customers are happy with their earlier products

Microsoft is trying to find its way in Private Cloud by trying various options. The Azure Stack is the latest one and we need to wait and see whether this one live up to its expectations.

Adoption to Enterprise Private Cloud and Managed Private Cloud are in the rise. The enterprise is not sticking to one private cloud platform anymore.

Cloud Ecosystem

The Cloud Ecosystem has been expanding and it is proved to be the biggest differentiator for the Cloud Service providers and platforms.

AWS offers more than 85+ Ecosystem services in their platform. Azure offers more than 90+ Ecosystem services in their platform. Openstack has more than 50+ incubated projects for Cloud Ecosystem.

In the run up, Cloud service providers have acquired some of the technologies to strengthen the ecosystem. Some of them are,

Amazon AWS acquired Security Start-up Harvest.io, Optimization start-up ClusterK, High performance Computing start-up NICE, Mobile Video company Elemental Technologies etc

Microsoft acquired Migration platform Inmage, e-discovery start-up Equivio, Access security provider Adallom, Security focussed company Security Islands etc

Google acquired hands on learning platform Qwiklabs, Mobile developer platform Fabric, Voice command Start-up Api.ai, API Management platform ApiGee, Testdrive platform Orbitera etc.

Among the ecosystem, AI, Security, Data analytics, High performance computing and Orchestration are gaining more importance.

Cloud Marketplace

Cloud Marketplace providers offering Infrastructure from multiple cloud service providers have faded as the smaller IaaS Service providers were not able to keep pace with the evolution of the large Cloud service providers. The large Cloud Service providers are expanding their footprint to support distributors and resellers to have more market penetration. Distributors and resellers are leveraging Cloud Market place platform to offer Cloud services from multiple service providers. Most of the distributors and resellers are working their way to offer Cloud services through marketplace. SaaS Cloud Market place is another area which is picking up.

Appdirect, ComputeNext, Mirakl are some of the leading Cloud marketplace platform providers.

This year we will see more focus towards Orchestration or interconnection of the SaaS service for Consumer consumption

Cloud Management

The pure play Cloud management is no longer attractive to customers as the customer pain points for Cloud adoption is not entirely solved by Cloud Management solutions and the ecosystem tools are expanding too fast for Cloud Management Solution to catch up on all features. We see a paradigm shift in the approach for Cloud Management. Some of the Cloud management solutions are maturing to become a Cloud Governance Solutions.

Cloud Brokerage

The highly talked about Cloud Brokerage market in 2012 has settled down to be part of Multi Cloud Management or Governance Solutions. The list of companies who offered Pure play Cloud Brokerage platform or no longer promoting just the brokerage. Either they have transformed to provide services closer to that or got acquired or nowhere in the map. This change in the market for Cloud brokerage is largely due to the domination of giants in Cloud Service providers and their market penetration. The brokerage companies expected many Cloud service providers to emerge but it has not happened hence they faced the axe. Some pieces of the Brokerage are anyway part of the Cloud Management or Governance solutions which the customers are happy about.

Cloud Governance

Cloud Governance, Brokerage, Marketplace, Management all have some overlaps in terms of technical features though the business consumption varies. Governance is the latest among the four. Cloud Governance takes care of Cloud resource Management, Operations automation, Cost Management, Security and Compliance of Cloud consumption.

As per the survey, 82% of Enterprises and ISV use more than one cloud so it becomes essential for enterprises to use Cloud Governance solutions to have control over the Consumption, improve productivity and Security of the multi cloud consumption

Some of the leading players in Multi Cloud Governance are Rightscale, Jamcracker and Corestack.

Cloud Security

The survey on Cloud Security indicates that the organizations are convinced that Cloud is no way less secure than hosted or on premise Data Centers. As the Cloud adoption increases, the concerns about security in Cloud are fading but the measures and efforts for securing the heterogeneous infrastructure is growing. Though we have seen unprecedented number of data breaches, hacking and other multitude of threats in the past year, these security threats are not necessarily limited to Cloud Infrastructure. The organizations are taking security very seriously and seeing that as a separate vertical whether it is Cloud or Non-Cloud Infrastructure. Security is becoming an in-built consideration in any new product release, not an afterthought.

The following are the trends for security measures

Transforming from Devops to Devsecops Managing Security through Security Operations Center (SOC) Adopting to SaaS based Security Services. The list of SaaS based security services are covered in my other blog Cloud strategy includes careful planning of Workload, Data, Application, Environment in Private Vs Public Cloud The Cloud Service Providers such as AWS, Azure and Google Compute Engine are coming up with their own on demand Security Services. This may be a threat for the SaaS based Security service providers but their ability to provide security services across these multiple clouds augment well for them.

Cloud Migration

Cloud Migration may sound like a solved problem but it is not yet. Every customer defines their own approach for migration and not all migration is 100% automated and seamless yet. Typically the large migrations are done by Cloud SIs in partnership with any of the migration tool Vendors. The migration is mostly a combination of tool based and manual process, as there are lot of considerations based on modularity, scalability, performance involved during the planning phase. There are multiple forms of Migrations happening such as Physical to Cloud, Virtual to Cloud and Cloud to Cloud. Migration happens either through Virtual Image or Operating System. Appzero, Racemi are based on Operating System. Zerto, Doubletake are based on Virtual Images.

AWS has introduced a set of migration tools which covers migration of Application, Data, Database, Server into AWS but the reverse is not supported.

Microsoft introduced Azure App Service Migration Assistant for migrating apps from Windows or Linux to Azure App Service

The Cloud migration is not yet as seamless as it has to be. The hope is on the containers to provide the ease of migration that the organization look for.

Cloud PaaS Platforms

PaaS platform was predicted to be the future of the cloud but it did not live up to its expectation due to some of the changes during the evolution. When we analysed the PaaS market in 2012, we found there were 66 PaaS platforms under construction. Not all of them are surviving now. Out of the list, CloudFoundry and Openshift emerged as the leaders in the PaaS Platforms. There are multiple siblings that came out of Cloudfoundry such as Stackato, Appfog, Ironfoundry etc.

PaaS Platforms did not provide the transformational approach for customers to migrate their application and it did not provide the control and flexibility required to manage the complex environments.

Evolution of Cloud Orchestration and Containers side-lined the focus and growth of PaaS platforms as they provided most of the features provided by PaaS platforms with less constraints.

Openshift and Cloudfoundry started supporting Docker to take advantage of the container image mobility.

There have been multiple acquisitions of PaaS Platforms including Appfog by Centurylink, Stackato by HP, Cumulogic by CA technologies, Makara by Redhat.

We see that PaaS platforms are opted for new application development rather than migration of existing applications.

Cloud PaaS Service Providers

After all the emergence, convergence and divergence in PaaS area, the leading PaaS Service providers are, Salesforce, Google App Engine, Redhat Openshift, IBM Bluemix, Engine Yard and Heroku (acquired by Salesforce).

Not all PaaS Platform providers provide PaaS services. While Azure and Google started with PaaS and moved to IaaS, AWS started with IaaS and added PaaS as part of their ecosystem of services.

PaaS sometimes finds itself as one of the services in the Organization Cloud strategy instead of being the only strategy. PaaS services like AWS Beanstalk, Azure App Service offered within Cloud Service providers are slowly picking up.

Cloud Object Storage platforms

The object storage platform which powers the Object Storage as Service or Internet Storage manages data as Object instead of Blocks or files. Object storage is becoming an important building block for customers in their Cloud adoption. OpenStack Swift is an open source object storage platform which is widely used and gaining popularity. Some of the world’s largest storage clouds such as SwiftStack, Rackspace, Internap are built using Openstack Swift. The Hybrid Object Storage adoption is on the rise. Most of the Object Storage platforms provide API which are compatible with the leading Object Storage Service providers such as S3 or Azure Blob to Support Hybrid Storage. The other Object Storage platforms include Redhat Ceph, Cloudian, Scality and EMC ECS.

Cloud Object Storage Service providers

Every Cloud adoption by an Organization is associated with the adoption of Cloud Object Storage as well. The Object Storage is used for managing configuration files, backup, logs, files etc. Like many other aspects of cloud computing, AWS S3 is considered a market leader in cloud object storage. The other leading Object Storage Service providers are Azure Blob Storage, Swiftstack, Rackspace, Internap, Google Cloud Storage, Tiscali and Scality. The object storage adoption is on the rise. The current trend in object storage is to have a hybrid object storage that helps in bursting to Cloud from the Enterprise Object Storage based on certain policies. AWS Storage Gateway service is to accelerate hybrid storage. AWS also has a cheaper version of Object Storage called AWS Glacier which is used for managing archives and backup.

Cloud File Hosting Service Providers

The Cloud file hosting service is matured and there are multiple players having a market share. Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft Onedrive, AWS Cloud Drive, Apple iCloud, Sugarsync and Mediafire are the leading Cloud File Storage Service Providers. The file storage is largely driven by Mobile and IoT devices. We see that Enterprise file servers are getting migrated to Cloud File hosting service providers. Enterprise Cloud file hosting requires lot of accelerators on Performance, Migration, Security and Availability which is driving innovation and acquisition of innovation.

Enterprise File Sharing Platform

As per Marketandmarkets report, the Enterprise File Sharing and Synchronization market size is expected to grow from USD 1.11 Billion in 2015 to USD 3.51 Billion by 2020, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 25.7%. Composed EFSS trend, demand for cloud-based integration, and Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) adoption have enabled wider adoption of EFSS solutions among many industries. Companies are increasingly adopting EFSS solutions to effectively share and manage the voluminous data being generated in their business processes on a daily basis and to improve the data security.

There are quite a number of players offering Enterprise File Sharing platform. Some of the leading players in this segments are Sharefile, Box, ownCloud, Egnyte, Sparkleshare, Seafile, Pydio, Syncplicity and WatchDox. ownCloud, Seafile and Pydio are Open source platforms. Some of the acquisition happened in this includes Syncplicity acquired by Axway, WatchDox acquired by Blackberry and Sharefile acquired by Citrix

Cloud Storage as a Service Providers

The storage needs are increasing for the enterprises like never before due to the increased need for real-time applications, Analytics, AI, Machine learning, Containers etc. IDC expects cloud IT infrastructure spending, which includes cloud data storage, to increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.1% between 2014 and 2019, reaching $53.1 billion by the latter year.

As per Techtarget, The enterprise storage market is heading for more disruption in 2017. Enterprise Storage Market has multiple sub segments like SDS, Hyperconverged, Storage Virtualization, Storage Controllers etc. Our focus in this blog is limited to Cloud Storage as a Service Providers who’s Storage can be consumed through Cloud such as AWS, Azure and Openstack.

Though the storage is available as part of the offering from Cloud Service Providers, there are few enterprise-class, full-featured cloud storage service providers for specialized needs such as secure data in public or hybrid clouds, High performance etc. There are not many players in this segment. The leading Cloud Storage as a Service providers for enterprise are Zadara Storage, NetApp, Nimble Storage, and SoftNAS.

Cloud Block Storage Platform

There is rapid growth anticipated in adoption of Virtual Private Cloud by enterprises for different tiers. As per reports, this market is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of 26.35% during 2016-2022 globally. This includes the Block Storage Platform as it is important to have Block Storage platforms as part of Virtual Private Cloud. The leading Open source Block Storage platforms are Openstack Cinder and Ceph Block Storage. Openstack Cloud platform supports both Cinder and Ceph for block Storage. On the Container Side, Flocker is a leading open-source container data volume orchestrator for Dockerized applications.

Cloud Orchestration

In Cloud Computing, we see products and tools in Cloud Management, Cloud Governance, Cloud Brokerage, Cloud Marketplace, Cloud Service Delivery, Cloud Application Management, Cloud Orchestration, Cloud Automation etc. Though all may sound the same, there is a difference in the fundamentals and features if we look at these products closely. What we increasingly see is that, the product started in one area among the list try to satisfy the needs of other areas as well. Some of the Cloud Management products started covering Cloud Governance, Automation and Orchestration. Cloudify, Terraform and Ansible are some of the leading pure play Open Source Cloud Orchestration platforms. The platform or service providers have their own Orchestration mechanism such as AWS CloudFormation, Azure ARM, Openstack Heat, Google Cloud Deployment Manager. Corestack, Converged Orchestration engine by Cloudenablers Inc supports all these Platform specific Templates along with chaining capability to support Multi Cloud Orchestration.

The cloud orchestration market to grow from USD 4.95 Billion in 2016 to USD 14.17 Billion by 2021, at a CAGR of 23.4% from 2016 to 2021. The rapid growth in the cloud orchestration market is mainly owing to the increase in the need of resource optimization among Small and Medium Enterprises

Some of the notable acquisition happen in this area includes Ansible acquired by Redhat, Calm.io acquired by Nutanix, Cliqr acquired by Cisco, Appformix acquired by Juniper and Stackstorm acquired by Brocade

Cloud Service Delivery Platform

Cloud Service Delivery Platform enables hosting service providers to offer unified Cloud Service delivery for their Cloud business. There are many self-service portal in the market which provide the capability to provision and manage a platform but very few that provide a packaged solution that takes care of not just managing but also giving the power to run the cloud services business for Cloud Service providers. Cloud Portal Business Manager (CPBM) and Atomia are some of the leading products in this space. Citrix Cloud portal manager was acquired by Acclerite in 2016. Atomia partnered with Canonical. NewScale had similar capability which was acquired by Cisco in 2011 and they announced end of sale for their 4.3 version in 2016.

CPBM supports Citrix Cloud platform natively and later started supporting Openstack. Atomia supports Openstack Cloud.

CPBM and Atomia are having handful of customers but the large Cloud service providers prefer to build their own Service delivery platform so there is no great traction for accelerated growth in this space.

Cloud Consumers

I have had opportunity to talk to number of customers who have adopted cloud or adopting cloud. Here is the summary of overall perception of the Cloud consumers (that I have interacted).

Cloud Service providers and platforms have really matured in the last few years. Cloud Ecosystem and value added services are maturing to meet the demands of the consumers. The on demand nature suits the start-up, ISV and SMB segments very well.

The concerns of security in the cloud is slowly fading in the minds of the Consumers as they now understand that the Cloud is no way less secure than on premise or hosted if both are exposed to internet. In fact the security services in the Cloud are on demand and there is no Capex involved, which provides them the ability to use the right kind of security tools for their needs.

Cloud is providing the agility the business needs, but the cloud service providers are not providing the ability to move the workload across providers. Customers are forced to work their own way to manage the vendor lock-in and workload movement across clouds.

While the consumers agree that the Cloud is the way to go, the roadmap on Private Cloud Vs Public Cloud Vs Hybrid Cloud is often taken based on the Cost economics. The cost economics is one of the exercises that is required as part of the Cloud roadmap of every organization. Hybrid Cloud is often selected since the private cloud provides cost advantages though it has some overheads.

Large enterprises adopt more than one cloud to make the best use of a variety of cloud services along with a private cloud. SMBs prefer to go with one CSP but they still prefer to maintain a private cloud. Start-ups prefer to operate with one Public Cloud. Though the Cloud provides Self Service capability, Consumers require Cloud Solution provider or System Integrators who help them with Consulting, Migration, Management and Automation of their workloads across Multiple Cloud environments.

Cloud with “As a Service” model is growing exponentially and there are various categories which keep coming up. The motivation for coming up with this blog is to provide a comprehensive list of various areas in Cloud Computing which forms the foundation for the growing Cloud Ecosystem. Thanks for reading through the State of the Cloud 2017, your feedback and suggestion are most welcome at sabapathy@cloduenablers.com.