⚓️ 🤹 🚵🏾 Tomorrow is cloudy: the clouds will have intelligence, they will complicate the hiring of IT-specialists, but they will help to sell software 💪🏿 👨🏼‍🎓 🖐🏿

In the annual cloud forecast, Dave Bartoletti, Forrester’s vice president and chief analyst, said the cloud market — SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS — would grow to $ 299.4 billion by 2020. But what does this really mean and what will change for business and IT professionals? The Mail.ru Cloud Solutions team gathered expert forecasts to understand the situation.

The main development trends

Cloud developers make more money

“ Cloud applications are a winning monetization strategy for open source software developers. The first generation of open source companies used a paid customer support model and training, but it turned out that it does not work well.

In 2020, pay-per-use cloud services will become the leading business model for open source companies. Clouds provide flexibility, speed, and scalability, and their use pays off. ”

Evan Kaplan, CEO, InfluxData.

Developing and launching applications becomes easier.

“2020 will be dedicated to simplifying application development and deployment. In 2019, we saw that developers turned to technologies that abstract from complexity and work in the form in which they are. I predict that this trend will continue. We will also see a new round of Kubernetes popularity. ”

Abby Kearns, Executive Director of the Cloud Foundry Foundation .

Kubernetes will begin to be used wherever there is big data

“ Kubernetes has become the most talked about technology with containerization support. In the future, all big data technologies will work on it. Perhaps this will not happen in 2020, but the popularity of Kubernetes will grow as more and more large providers deploy their platforms on this software.

There are some disadvantages that need to be addressed: for example, problems with persistent storage, but they are currently being addressed through initiatives such as BlueK8. "

Kunal Agarwal, CEO of Unravel Data .

Main trends for business

Providers will help companies in the race for digitalization

“One of the problems of companies is how to stay at the peak, constantly introducing innovations, which are becoming more and more. The speed of the modern technology world is amazing, it is difficult for corporate consumers to keep abreast.

As a result, cloud providers will expand support and training services to help companies cope with this fatigue, move to the cloud and make it easier to implement high-level services such as artificial intelligence and machine learning . ”

Nick McQuire, Vice President and Head of Research, Corporate Governance and Artificial Intelligence at CSS Insights .

PaaS wins box solutions

“When it comes to DevOps , companies need more than just tools. They are looking for ready-made platforms that combine with current tools, and also add value to them. For example, in the form of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and analytics.

In 2019, the level of implementation of public clouds was 94%, and the level of development of private clouds was 72%, so I predict that in 2020 we will see a transition to flexible PaaS platforms. Such platforms are easier to adapt to the needs of the company than boxed solutions. ”

Tej Redkar, Product Director, LogicMonitor .

Clouds make IT hiring harder

“According to research, most companies are faced with the fact that existing employees can not cope with 90% of the tasks implemented in the cloud. As a result, you have to look for new ones.

The popular multi-cloud approach often requires access to specialists and special tools for each used cloud platform. Many companies cannot search for engineers with the necessary experience for several months. “You have to hire someone mediocre or invest huge amounts of money in training your own employees, which can also take a long time.”

Dob Todorov, CEO, Consulting Partner, AWS HeleCloud .

Digitalization is contagious: even banks and medicine go to the clouds

“Retail, the financial sector, healthcare, medicine and other industries will move to the cloud only model. That is, they are beginning to consider building cloud infrastructure as the only business development scenario.

This is because cloud services allow you to switch to a modern architecture and upgrade IT systems. And also to use ready-made components: PaaS (platforms as services) and applications in marketplaces - they, like designer cubes, make it possible to assemble the infrastructure for the requirements of the business. As infrastructure bricks, you can use databases, machine learning environments, monitoring systems, containers for applications, and much more.

In addition, it is cheaper to test new hypotheses in the clouds and implement innovative technologies faster: big data, artificial intelligence, the Internet of things and others. ”

Ilya Letunov, Head of Mail.Ru Cloud Solutions.

Clouds are no longer a trend, but a practical tool for transformation

“Previously, companies often talked about what cloud computing is, what they can, why they are needed. Now they really think how to use the clouds to work more efficiently, bring products to the market faster, analyze data, save on IT systems .

Companies want to innovate, develop new services and applications instead of wasting energy on maintaining the infrastructure. Cloud technology helps reduce the budget for supporting IT systems. ”

Lauren States, Vice President of Strategy and Transformation for IBM's Software Group Sales:

Main trends in building IT infrastructures

Many companies will work with multiple clouds at once.

“There is a lot of talk about multi-cloud, but few companies have fully adopted a multi-cloud strategy. Most enterprises deploy applications on several public cloud platforms. However, they usually store one application in its entirety in one cloud, and another in another cloud, instead of deploying one application in multiple clouds.

In 2020, the situation will change: more and more applications will be deployed in two or more public clouds. This approach allows you to better use the unique features of each cloud. It also improves application availability: if one cloud shuts down, the application will work in another. Another plus is the ability to comply with legal requirements , for example, in the placement of applications and data. ”

Ankur Singla, CEO of Volterra .

But this is not accurate: many will also choose only one provider

“Over the past few years, large companies have increasingly chosen multi-cloud. But then we will see how organizations abandon this approach and move on to choosing one strategic provider of cloud services. One that can satisfy all the needs of the digital transformation of the business.

“Some of the largest cloud deals we saw in 2019 were made with companies that chose one cloud provider.”

Nick McQuire, Vice President and Head of Research, Corporate Governance and Artificial Intelligence at CSS Insights .

Clouds get smarter and process petabytes of data

“The transformation caused by the increase in the amount of data leads to the development of technologies such as the“ smart cloud ”- platforms created using artificial intelligence, and“ smart edge computing ”- that is, data processing using AI is closer to the place of their collection, for example, closer to the level of IoT sensors. This provides new opportunities for analytics and data use. ”

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO:

Hybrid clouds help process business data

“A hybrid cloud is a combination of two or more cloud environments. We see that large enterprises do not develop data processing solutions, such as Hadoop , in their own infrastructure, investing instead in public clouds.

However, they still do not want to transfer basic corporate data there. Such data will remain inside the company, and the calculations will go to the cloud, which is especially important for unpredictable workloads. ”

Haoyuan Li, Founder and CTO of Alluxio .

Distributed cloud will become a new level of development of public clouds

“Distributed cloud - the location of public cloud services outside the physical data center provider , while they are still controlled by the provider. The cloud service provider is still responsible for all aspects of the cloud services architecture, administration, and updating. The transition from a centralized public cloud to a distributed public cloud ushers in a new era of cloud computing.

A distributed cloud allows data centers to be located anywhere. This solves the technical problems, as well as the problems of legislative regulation. ”

Gartner Forecast:

This article was prepared with the support of Mail.ru Cloud Solutions

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Tomorrow is cloudy: the clouds will have intelligence, they will complicate the hiring of IT-specialists, but they will help to sell software