Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2013.  Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed article by Greg Arnette, CTO & founder of Sonian

Predicting Cloud Movements for 2013

Cloud Innovation Moves From IaaS to PaaS

The modern cloud era began in 2007 with Amazon Web Services and the introduction of compute, storage and networking in the form of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Fast-forward five years later to present day and you'll see that just around the corner is the next cloud innovation wave. The year 2013 will focus on Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings that provide higher-level SaaS application building blocks. PaaS offerings include relational database as a service, key value store as a service (NoSQL), automated application deployment, automatic scaling, virtual networking / secure computing and sending email as a service. PaaS is growing quickly and there are no signs of stopping it-every six months there is a new offering.

Platform as a Service is getting more attention from leading edge independent software vendors because PaaS allows for faster time-to-market for new projects. It also allows existing projects to scale more quickly and has proven to be more cost effective. PaaS represents the original premise for the cloud; focus on core competencies and lets others supply the commodity building blocks. An application developer creating the next hot mobile application should focus on the user experience and domain expertise. If the application developer is distracted in creating an automatic deployment system built on IaaS instead of "renting" the PaaS equivalent, then it's considered a wasted effort and a distraction from the core mission.

Server-less Architectures Will Start to Emerge

Building upon the PaaS momentum is the next wave; server-less architectures. This is the concept that future cloud applications will be built on the idea that the cloud is a giant mainframe computer. Current cloud architectures are based on replicating the design patterns from the pre-cloud co-location era, which means dedicated or semi-dedicated virtual instances supporting application.

One of the cloud's best aspects is that it allows new concepts to be explored, which has led to the increasing interest in creating applications that are not server dependent, but rather can function within an application virtual machine environment. This means there are no more specific servers, but instead virtualized application framework runtimes. For example, the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) runs Java programs. Imagine if there were a pool of JVM resources an application could pull from and the application did not have to be aware of specific compute instances...

Of course, behind the scenes there are real servers hosting the JVM runtimes, but the application developer does not have to be concerned with provisioning or managing the host operating systems and can focus on creating the best Java application. It's exciting to think about the cloud evolving into a large shared mainframe with superior cost and reliability baked into the core. Everyone except for the legacy server vendors will benefit.

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Greg Arnette is the founder and CTO of cloud archiving company Sonian. He has been a messaging, collaboration, Internet, and networking expert for over 15 years and has founded two previous technology companies. You can connect with him @gregarnette and read his blog for thoughts on cloud computing, collaboration and startups at gregarnette.com.