Cloud Computing Trends for 2016 and Beyond - What to Expect

Introduction

There is an extensive amount of hype and chatter around the concept of cloud, at the moment – especially since startups have begun to go public.

Over the last few years, no other area of IT has produced as much investment, interest, and hype as cloud computing.

2015 clearly showed what the cloud infrastructure, in its self-service glory and scalability, will be good for: that is, running the applications that consist of microservices which are outfitted with RESTful APIs. These services will most likely run in containers, giving developers more control in testing, building, and deploying of applications.

Thus, it has been made clear the world that cloud computing will be an essential tool in delivering service to businesses and end-users.

As we come to the end of 2015, we give you the predictions and the trends to look out for in cloud computing for 2016.

Key Statistics Regarding the Current Cloud Computing Landscape

A recent article by Forbes sums up the key statistics with regards to the current cloud computing landscape and a peek into the future. The AWS or the Amazon Web Services is the dominating and the leading player in cloud computing, closely followed by Microsoft Azure, the Rackspace Public Cloud, and VMware’s vCloud.



The cloud platform and infrastructure market roughly generates $21billion in revenues and is expected to grow and a drastic 20% until 2018 where revenues will reach $43 billion.



Unlike common belief. The cloud services will not be limited to large enterprises and corporations. It is estimated that 64% of the small to the medium-sized business will also take to cloud, with up to 78% of the businesses showing an indication to buying new cloud-based solutions in the next few years.
With these figures cloud computing is elevated from ‘just a feature’ to an important and a necessary part of an organization’s infrastructure.

The Predictions for 2016

Cloud Applications

With the arrival of 2016, more and more applications to the cloud will arise. A number of organizations and businesses have already spent a large portion of their IT budget on cloud applications and these numbers are said to grow in the following year as applications will be built more for the cloud than for desktops.



More developers will focus their talents on cloud-based services. It is estimated by the Evans Data Corporation that there are currently more than 18 million software developers around the world – but only 25% of them are into the cloud. In 2016, this number is said to increase as more software developers will begin to realize the shift of business revenue streams to cloud. Commercial, third party, contributor software, and enterprise will begin to surface, attempting to take a slice of the market.

The Hybrid Cloud

The hybrid cloud solutions have been recorded to have made huge wins throughout 2014 and in early 2015. This is expected to continue to grow in 2016 as well. The blend of the on and off cloud premises facilities offer the best of both worlds to the enterprises that are demanding growth in addition to reducing the complexity of making a pure cloud switch, to begin with. It is said to be more of an overlapping hybrid cloud combination, which will allow complex cloud delivers in the simplest of deliveries.



Seeing an increase from 8% to 82% of enterprises turning to the hybrid cloud strategy, the hybrid cloud will continue to take over the public and the private alternatives. The hybrid cloud computing can afford the security that is associated with the private cloud hand in hand with the achievement of cost benefits they are associated with the economies of the scale of public cloud computing.

The hybrid strategy is also more flexible than the other two, when it comes to demands across projects, and finding solutions to different requirements of every application that is running.

Thus when it comes to the terms of scaling up, the hybrid allows users to achieve higher server usage at reasonable and affordable costs, and allow the storage of sensitive data on private sectors.

The Cloud Will Shift from Developer-friendly to Developer-driven

One of the primary consumers of cloud services is application developers. A large number of services strive to be developer-friendly to drive adoption. In the future, it is predicted that being developer-friendly will not be enough. Clouds will make a shift to being developer-driven. All cloud services will support continuous integrations and continuous delivery. In fact, continuously delivering will become a core tenet of cloud computing, which in turn will bring the cloud closer to developers.



The various layers of cloud, infrastructure to the platform to the application, will all be fundamentally API driven. APIs may or may not start out as REST interfaces. Newer APLI standards are said to emerge replacing REST for more dynamic and seamless integration.

Most of the Large Cloud Platforms Will Be Penetrated by Containers

Larger cloud providers like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have adopted container technologies. Additionally, the technology providers at the OS, the application, and the hardware are building support for containerization. Take, for instance, Intel, which has just released the Cloud Integrity Technology (CIT) which provides a chain of trust attestation from the hardware root of trust to the container level.

With the widening of support for containers and the increase in operational/ deployment technologies maturity in the container ecosystems, more microservice applications will be built on containers which will enable new systems of engagement and more modern user experiences. With the coming of 2017, most of the cloud platforms would either support containers or will have switched to a new container stack.

The perfect tool for efficient resource utilization is container technologies. The containerization is a situation where every container is a type of OS virtualization and provides ample resources to run an application without the creation of conflict with other application containers are running on the same machine, thus eliminating the problem of using an entire OS to run one application.

Growth is expected to be seen in the adoption of container technologies because the CaaS (Container-as-a-Service) is more efficient as compared to the hardware virtualization.

Looking forward to enhancing your cloud computing skills? Enroll in our cloud computing certification course today and take your career to new heights

The Cloud Will Be Ubiquitous, Obliterating the Terms ‘private’, ‘public’, and ‘hybrid’

We still are at the stage where the cloud is classified at ‘private’, ‘public’, and ‘hybrid’. The introduction to containers and the new agile management/ deployment technologies has led to the cloud server locations to become irrelevant.

In the future, organizations will no longer talk about public vs. private clouds. In addition to this, the focus will fall on user experience that is backed by and decoupled from the always-on and fundamentally elastic infrastructure that can live anywhere be it the developer’s work station to the large data centers that are halfway around the world.



Due to this, the nomenclature of the private, public or hybrid cloud will become obsolete. What will be left is the omnipresent abstract layer – the cloud.

Continuous Delivery

There is great news in store for the DevOps teams, as the cloud services are expected to increase support for continuous delivery.

Continuous delivery will ensure the updating of applications from the backend and continuously delivering it to the end-users, even when they are in the middle of the application usage. The advantage of continuous delivery is that the complexity of the online applications increase and new updates will be required on a daily basis.

The benefits will include many more engaged users and the overall performance of the application. DevOps teams will also be helped by reducing the time taken for bug resolution as well as the reduction of repetitive tasks. 

The Certification to Look out for in 2016

With the increased use of cloud computing and its bright future, there is going to be a huge demand for qualified and certified cloud IT professionals.



One of the top cloud certifications to opt for in 2016 is CompTIA Cloud +. With a total of 139 jobs in November itself on job portals, CompTIA Cloud + stands the second most in-demand jobs in the cloud computing industry.

Become a Certified Expert in AWS, Azure and GCP

Caltech Cloud Computing BootcampExplore Program

Conclusion

We’ve given you all we know and all you need to know! Now it is your turn. So roll up your sleeves and get yourselves armed and ready for the cloud computing wave to hit.

Simplilearn offers the CompTIA cloud + training course to help you out. With 12 hrs. of High-Quality e-Learning Content, 7 Lab Exercises, hands-on Implementation of Virtualization, 10 Chapter-end Quizzes, coverage of topics like IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, hands-on sessions based on real-life scenarios, and authorized by CompTIA, the training is all you need to give your career a boost.

CompTIA Cloud+ Training

So get prepared and get out there.

Get a taste of what we offer with a short sneak peek into one of our world-renowned courses:
​