As the end of the year approaches, and we look ahead at what the 2020 tech trends promise to have in store for the cloud, we can’t help but also reflect on what the past years’ trends have foretold and given us thus far. As we enter 2020 we are not only entering a new year, but also a new decade, so it’s doubly interesting (and fun) to sit back and ponder on what the year and decade ahead might hold.

Before summoning the oracle and thinking ahead specifically on the future of cloud management, it’s worthwhile looking back at the big picture over the last decade to give us some sense of what we have to look forward to. Let’s start with the proverbial ‘gorilla’. AWS was founded in 2006 and had reached annual revenues by 2010 of ~$500MM. Not bad growth from a standing start and a growth trend which continued throughout the decade. With Wall St. estimates of some $50B in revenue for 2020, this means 100x growth. That is quite simply incredible and with growth last year at 35% year-on-year, this AWS growth doesn’t look like it will stop..

2010 Cloud Prediction

Amazon Cloud Revenue Could Exceed $500 Million In 2010, CRN (2010)

Growth among Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform has also not been too shabby but AWS has held (and in many ways strengthened) its dominant position over the last decade.

Due to the wonderful archival powers of the internet, finding white papers on the future of cloud from a decade ago is no more than a few clicks away. Rather than try and summarize them here, it’s worth reviewing yourself – one that’s worth taking a look at is Microsoft’s The Economics of the Cloud (2010). Some parts were right, some wrong, but the key point was that: “cloud services will enable IT groups to focus more on innovation while leaving non-differentiating activities to reliable and cost-effective providers”.

On this particular point, it’s hard to argue that as a result new companies and new business models have been realized in ways previously not imaginable. Be it in the world of the sharing economy, Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, etc or the myriad of other cloud powered unicorns which have been built over the last decade, cloud infrastructure has been a huge enabler of growth.

As interesting as it would be to speculate on where the cloud industry might be headed to by 2030, (AI-Cloud, IOT, Blockchain, Space Cloud Computing, etc) and so that we keep our feet firmly on the ground, the trends we at ParkMyCloud feel qualified to comment on are somewhat more modest and closer to home.

  • Cloud Management – What we are seeing here is demand from customers for a more consolidated view across their multiple cloud accounts. In 2019 we saw a lot of our customers going mainstream in the multi-cloud world and trying to integrate a mix of cloud-native and third-party tools to provide actionable insights and more importantly actions. The companies building Cloud Management technologies have grown over the last decade but in many ways, it remains a small and no unicorns have yet emerged. We think this will change in the coming decade as the management of cloud infrastructure in all aspects (technical, economic, etc) has reached such a scale it requires non-human intervention and coordination.
  • Multi-cloud – Multi-cloud truly arrived in 2019 and we believe it will grow in 2020. Most organizations now use multiple clouds and among our customer base, there appears to be less concern about vendor lock-in. We also increasingly see specific clouds being used for specific purposes, so, for instance, data analytics workloads utilizing one particular cloud provider, whereas development and production sit on an entirely different cloud.
  • Automation – Building on what we see happening in the world of Cloud Management, the demand for automation across the technical and economic management stack is growing. Companies are getting more comfortable with semi-autonomous modes and in some cases moving to full-blown automation. Many have drawn the comparison with the 1 to 5 scale used in the field of autonomous vehicles and we like this analogy. With many now operating at level 2(Partial) or level 3(Conditional) we see this continuing to move closer to levels 4 (High) and 5 (Full) automation in relation to cloud management activities.
  • Greater Levels of Abstraction – IT will continue to become more and more abstracted in 2020 and beyond (NoOps). The growth of serverless, containers, software-defined hardware, etc means that engineers / devs are thinking less and less about infrastructure. The focus away from operations and toward outcomes is another clear trend and likely one which will continue for some time.
  • Containers Become Mainstream – Application containerization is more than just a new buzz-word in cloud computing; it is changing the way in which resources are deployed into the cloud. More and more companies utilized containers in 2019 and we have seen estimates that suggest that one-third of hybrid cloud workloads will utilize containers in 2020 (ESG Research). Over the last couple of years, Kubernetes has established itself as the container orchestration platform of choice. 451 Research projects the market size of application container technologies to reach $4.3 billion by 2022 more businesses will view containers as a fundamental part of their IT strategy.

We have always enjoyed the quote ‘never make predictions, especially about the future.’ Nevertheless, entering a new year and a new decade it’s hard not to. We think the predictions above are fairly safe bets but equally, we are sure the speed and scale of change will likely be faster than we predicted.

Afternote

In doing this research our favorite headline from 2010 was “Airbnb Founder Eats His Own Dogfood, Goes ‘Homeless’ For Months”. Enjoy. Season’s greetings and happy 2020.