Cloud computing has evolved into multi-cloud strategy, which involves the combination of two or more cloud computing services and helps to avoid vendor lock-in. Initially companies adopted this strategy due to uncertainty regarding cloud reliability. Laws and regulations in certain region mandate enterprise data to be physically resided in certain locations, which has also driven the adoption of multi-cloud strategy.

Another major trend in cloud computing is shift towards automation, and eventual move towards Artificial Intelligence (AI). Currently, automation is used for low-level tasks that need to be executed with high speed and consistency. Portability and interoperability related to data, application, platform and management are major factors in cloud computing and tech companies like Google and IBM are moving towards containerization for achieving it. For instance, Google has added the capabilities for containerization in Google Cloud Platform and has announced on-premise version of the Google Kubernetes Engine.

Some of the major players which are into Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) as of 2018 are Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure while Red Hat OpenShift continued to play a major role in Platform as a Service (PaaS).

Conclusion

Management of large-scale deployments using containerization will be a major challenge for many businesses. While major cloud computing service providers are innovating, minor ones will face tough competition to survive. Serverless computing model, in which cloud provider runs the server and charges based on the amount of resources consumed by an application, is expected to gain more momentum in 2019. It might also be accompanied by edge computing which involves processing data where it is being generated rather than using a centralised data-processing warehouse.

- Arjun Das
ICT - Research Analyst
Infoholic Research