New tri-polar public cloud world

Looks like the status quo of the world of the public clouds is going to change. Current clear leaders, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure have almost formed bipolar public cloud world. However the other big player that was not that eager before is starting to challenge the leaders: Google Cloud Platform.

In public cloud’s economy of scale the number and global distribution of the datacenters is absolutely crucial for the leadership. This takes tremendous capital expenditures to build and wire that kind of the global infrastructure, and huge operational expenditures to run it; only the biggest players can do this. This also takes great commitment to cloud computing vision to become invested in such an expensive game.

The expansion of the Amazon’s and Microsoft datacenter all over the world is very impressive, you can easily see it for both companies: Microsoft Azure https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/regions/, AWS https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/ . Both of them are aggressively trying to cover the globe even better (even under the sea: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/01/technology/microsoft-plumbs-oceans-depths-to-test-underwater-data-center.html )

What Google responded with in terms of the datacenters for the public cloud wasn’t that impressive, you can see the reach here: https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/ . Yes, Google has great infrastructure supporting its own operations (search and other services), yet not it’s Cloud Platform.

However there is great news that Google made a higher stake on its public cloud and going to build the datacenters in more than 10 new regions over the world till the end of 2017:  https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/03/announcing-two-new-Cloud-Platform-Regions-and-10-more-to-come_22.html.

Why great news? Because this tougher competition means better rates for the cloud services for the consumers, more innovations from all those players. All of them are big enough to make it, none of them look “just experimenting” now.

Public clouds are transforming as fast as atmospheric clouds

Is your team developing any solutions that are hosted in public clouds? I mean any software that uses AWS or Microsoft Azure as an infrastructure (IaaS) or platform (PaaS) or both. If yes, you have definitely noticed that the pace of changes of AWS and Azure is extremely fast these days.

To see the speed of changes, you can go through the recent announcements lists for both leading public cloud vendors, AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/ru/new/, and Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/roadmap/recently-available.aspx. Such speed is only possible because there are no traditional release cycles, they release several times per month/week; this is DevOps world.

Of course such pace is a very significant factor for those parties who depend on the public clouds (cloud solution providers, independent software vendors, enterprises, etc.). Both leaders, Amazon and Microsoft, are trying as hard as possible to stick to the commitments they give to the partners/customers regarding the direction they move.

Microsoft, being very oriented to enterprise market, is even trying to make its roadmap clear and public, they recently announced the public Azure roadmap: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/server-cloud/2015/01/30/increasing-visibility-for-our-customers-announcing-the-cloud-platform-roadmap-site/. You can see the roadmap here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/roadmap.

I am not aware of any public roadmap for AWS for the moment. So what is the risk of having your public cloud provider evolving very fast, why is it significant to realize what set of technologies you public cloud will become in 1, 2, 3 year from now?

Of course, the services/APIs you use now, whether this is IaaS of PaaS level, will not become unsupported without any notice (that would threaten your cloud provider business image), however it is very possible the cloud technologies you are investing in right now will be superseded by their successor technologies in some mid-term perspective and there is no guarantee those two will be backward compatible.

Let’s consider an example with Microsoft Azure: there is big movement from IaaS v.1 to IaaS v.2 currently. New approach, called Azure Resource Manager changes the picture a lot: the whole ideology, API, limits, all this changes significantly (for the better). IaaS v.1 and v.2 are co-existing and not compatible, so you have to choose which way to go. It could sound obvious, just select the most recent version, however the v.2 just doesn’t support all of the Azure features yet the v.1 supports, so right now with v.1 you will be limited, but strategically you are winning.

To summarize, since public cloud vendors are moving really fast mostly due to an extremely intense competition and constantly evolving understanding of Cloud Computing, if you are a part (especially a leader) of a team developing for the public cloud, you need to understand the trajectory the vendor’s technologies are moving and to have the strategy for keeping up.