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provider business image), however it is very possible the cloud technologies you are investing in right now will be superseded by their successor technologies in some mid-term perspective and there is no guarantee those two will be backward compatible.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.

if(yourPublicCloud.isClosing)

With the news of HP Helion Public Cloud to close down in January 2016 we can again re-consider main public cloud risk factors we always should keep in mind.

Of course this is not the first time the public cloud provider is going dark, getting out of business or just shifting the strategy so the public cloud is discontinued (Nirvanix, Megacloud to name a few). As soon as public cloud is a mass market this takes a lot to compete in this low margin area.

Public cloud provider has to be a really big player to support the huge compute resources in the data centers across the globe. All the leaders in the area are having them: AWS, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, Google. To some degree this can be considered a significant risk mitigation to rely on the leader CSP (Cloud Services Provider) that currently demonstates vision and strategy execution in public cloud area (for example, you can see those CSPs positioned at Gartner's Magic Quadrants upper-right part).

Nevertheless, if the public cloud you are using was announced to be closed down, what are the factors that can make migration from it more expensive, hard or even impossible, so you are getting “locked in” the that cloud? I would assume the main of them (but for sure not all) are:

1. Using CSP-specific functionality that can't be easily migrated. This is a typical risk of PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) model as opposed to the IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service). You are not just dealing with some virtual machine images you can export/import/recreate; you are using vendor-specific services.
2. Keeping a lot of the data in the cloud. For the data it is easy/cheap to get in, yet moving out of the cloud is typically charged much higher.
3. Using public cloud as a primary infrastructure could be considered a risk as well. One thing is just to “burst” into public cloud when it is needed for the compute elasticity, another thing is to be fully based in public cloud.

See also my post: Risk Identification in Cloud-based Software Development Projects.