Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2015. Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed article by John Meadows, Vice President of Business Development, Talligent
2015 Outlook – Public Cloud and OpenStack
1.
Public
cloud prices will continue to drop. This
is a bit like predicting the continuation of Moores' law in 2015, or maybe that
it will be hot in Austin next summer.
Somehow, it always seems to create a lot of press and blogger activity
when Microsoft, Google, or Amazon lowers the cost of their compute instances. Breathless
questions inevitably pop up - "is there a price war going on?", "will the other
vendors match the drop?" "will cloud company X be chased out of business".
Here are the short answers: "Yes, the
battles will likely continue"; "Yes, otherwise the responding vendor risks
losing market share"; "Yes, consolidation is likely". Prices will continue to drop because a basic
compute instance is generally non-differentiated across the big cloud providers. A VM is a VM is a VM. Since the cost of compute is decreasing,
economics says that prices will decrease with decreases to the marginal cost.
Competition is fierce. We expect to see
companies drop out or be acquired but the market is expanding tremendously
right now with many new entrants working to differentiate their public and
private hosted cloud offerings.
So when the price drops happen in
2015, don't be surprised. Know how it
impacts your business and the IT services you are providing and factor it into
your 2015 strategic plan.
2.
Openstack
will take care of your pet. This
prediction is not so obvious. There is
tremendous amount of interest within the Openstack community to cater to the
needs of the enterprise. This includes
managing a wide range of workloads that might not easily fit the traditional
cloud model.
In broad terms, OpenStack has to become
much more accessible to traditional IT organizations to stay relevant. Community members are well aware of this and
are working hard to improve usability. Not
only is the platform itself maturing (the result of 10s of thousands of
development hours per release), but the ecosystem, infrastructure components,
and management tools are growing and maturing as well. In 2015, deployment will
become simpler, management will become more robust and straight forward, and
visibility will improve. Next year,
OpenStack adoption will expand beyond public cloud providers and devops
deployments to see meaningful enterprise production deployments.
##
About the Author
John Meadows is the Vice President of
Business Development for Talligent.
Talligent enables the business of cloud by providing OpenStack
management tools that delivers visibility and control to enterprises and
service providers deploying private or public production clouds. This includes billing/showback, management reporting,
self-service automation, and full customer life-cycle capabilities.