Top 3 Cloud Computing Trends to Watch for in 2018

The great migration of data from on-premise storage to the cloud began in 2006 when Amazon released Simple Storage Service (S3) in 2006. We have come a long way since then with a new generation of technologies and high-density drives enabling service providers to re-architect cloud computing to offer better performance and pricing models.

So what can we expect from the cloud computing universe in 2018?

For the most part, experts predict that the cloud storage market will be more like a utility. This is because almost every application on the planet will require storage. With the Internet of Things and the growth of media-centric applications, data will soon dominate operating costs.

As cloud storage prices continue to fall, a new era in cloud storage is expected to emerge over the next few months. For this post, let’s take a look at the top 3 cloud computing trends to watch out for in 2018.

1. Kubernetes Will Become the De Facto Cloud Orchestrator

With a little help from Docker, Kubernetes (or K8s) will be the de facto cloud orchestrator. This is because K8s makes it easy to manage and migrate software code.

K8s was developed by Google and its design is based on the tech giant’s prior proprietary orchestration platform, the Borg project. Since its debut in July 2015, the company went on to partner with the Linux Foundation to develop CNCF. Since then, K8s has been donated as a seed project.

This is the catalyst that has driven this technology forward over the last three years. Today, it has grown to become the default orchestration engine for container-based workloads. It’s not surprising as although this technology was donated, it’s still backed by over ten years of research and experience running containers at Google.

Today, K8s has been adopted across the industry by Docker, Microsoft Azure, and Mesosphere DC/OS. This shows that K8s has proven its worth in providing the following:

• Better scaling
• Efficient management
• Simpler cloud deployment

2. Increased Adoption of Cloud Storage Will Be Driven by New Rules and Regulations

Cloud storage will be dominated by new laws and regulations related to data governance and compliance that’s expected to come into full effect this year. This means that the way enterprises store their data will become more unified.

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As certifications become more arduous and expensive, businesses will turn to cloud companies to help them keep up with all the compliance requirements. As a result, the following will further accelerate the migration of on-premises data to the cloud:

• CJIS
• FERPA
• FINRA
• HIPPA
• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

At the same time, more and more countries are demanding that data be stored within their borders. This means that cloud storage vendors will have to be able to support a large number of small data centers instead of a few enormous data centers.

How quickly and efficiently cloud vendors adapt to this situation will dictate who wins and who fades away.

3. The Rise of Serverless Architectures

The key advantages of cloud storage are its pay-per-use consumption model and its ease of use for spinning up extra resources. For example, something like an instance or VM is an additional unit of computing resources.

Serverless computing operates differently than traditional server networks. As idle cloud instances equal waste, going serverless can potentially improve efficiency by as much as 10x. With a lot of competition in the marketplace, these savings will trickle down to the end-user.

According to Gartner, by 2020, 90 percent of all serverless deployments will take place outside the IT departments’ infrastructure and operations groups when supporting general-use patterns. At present, we already have options like AWS Lamba and comparable offerings from both Google and Microsoft.

Whether everyone goes serverless remains to be seen, but there’s a good chance of it becoming a reality as placing the responsibility of managing and scaling resources on a cloud provider does take the pressure off in-house IT departments. It’s also a highly cost-efficient solution for enterprises of all sizes.

Application development can also accelerate as going serverless provides developers with access to a limitless supply of virtual machines with minimal effort and no upfront costs. This means that developers can easily and quickly set up servers with whatever operating system they choose to work with.

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