The Real State of Cloud

Gartner sometimes seems to think there’s only one way to cloud. Some of us think otherwise:

With no published end-user research other than a conference straw poll, the Gartner cloud myth is that there is just one way to “cloud.” If it’s not a public cloud (and presumably an AWS public cloud) then you are just wasting your time and money drinking the Kool-Aid of legacy vendors.

Missing in the Gartner hyperbole, of course, is any quantitative end-user research of how cloud resources are being used or how businesses value IT and cloud resources. The debate is no longer about which cloud to use: public vs. private vs. hybrid. It’s a false argument that presumes there is only one way to “cloud.” It doesn’t consider how businesses value, use and consume cloud resources.

The more important question is not “which,” but “when”: When public, when private and when hybrid? This is where actual research and some data are needed for context.

Knieriemen goes on to elaborate the findings of a 451 Research study that speaks about why enterprises are adopting public, hosted or private cloud. Flexibility, elasticity, features and security are well present in their reasons. It’s not those words that surprise me. It’s those that are absent. Fundamentally “open”, “lock-in” and “cloud-native”.

As I see it, if you think of “cloud” as “some better place where to move my production apps” you’re missing the bigger part of the story. “Cloud” is a way of doing things, a new paradigm around how applications should be built around microservices. A new, more scalable, more robust, anti fragile architecture pattern.

NGINX has an excellent blog series around Microservices:

Building complex applications is inherently difficult. A Monolithic architecture only makes sense for simple, lightweight applications. You will end up in a world of pain if you use it for complex applications. The Microservices architecture pattern is the better choice for complex, evolving applications despite the drawbacks and implementation challenges.

They are at the core of what the cloud is. Google, Twitter, Facebook, Siri, Amazon are not the success stories they are because they run on (or build) public IaaS, but because they have shifted gears and embraced a new way to build applications that scale effortlessly and are robust as granite not because of where they run, but because of how they’re built.

Choosing your cloud strategy just thinking about “where to deploy my pets” is a doomed path. “How to stop worrying about pets and embrace cattle” (or even flocks of birds) is a better starting point. Everything else comes afterwards.