Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2015.  Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed article by Harshal Pimpalkhute, product marketing engineer, at A10 Networks

New L4-L7 Services Needed for Tomorrow’s Cloud IaaS Environments

Cloud IaaS deliver vastly greater business agility, service provisioning times, and economics. These environments require that underlying infrastructure be automated and scalable to build an on-demand delivery model providing dynamic and consistent services in a shared, multi-tenant environment. In order to do so, it is critically important to have a seamless integration of application networking services with other data center infrastructure to deliver dynamic L4-7 services and automated policy enforcement for service-level agreements (SLAs) and compliance in a shared, multi-tenant environment. Customers have now come to expect the same L4-L7 Application Delivery Controller  (ADC) services in cloud and virtual environments as they receive via on-premise Data Center. As Cloud IaaS gains momentum, in 2015 Programmability, Rich Analytics and Secure Cloud Interconnects and are going to be key areas of innovation for L4-L7 Services. Let's examine these areas briefly for next year:

Programmability: As cloud infrastructure gets deployed across segments, customers are looking for flexible components that can interoperate with each other. An open standards-based approach that maximizes infrastructure design options will be critical to success of any product in the cloud domain in 2015. Organizations need tools to manage traffic flows in a highly shared multi-tenant environment. Standards-based RESTful APIs designed from the ground up for cloud and virtualization interoperability will be leveraged heavily as we see more deployments of Cloud IaaS. The availability, consistency and capability of these APIs will dictate the success of a product in the cloud economy. In 2015, APIs will be used for a multitude of use cases ranging from the obvious - provisioning, monitoring, maintenance - to the more evolved use cases such service chaining and life cycle management.

Rich Analytics: Virtual Machine (VM) sprawl was an issue that plagued administrators after virtualization became mainstream. With Cloud gaining momentum operators will have to address infrastructure sprawl. Powerful analytics providing insights into virtual machine data, application traffic patterns and network utilization are going to be key to manage Cloud IaaS. Operators can use this data for capacity planning, managing user experience, and ensuring network efficiencies. In 2014 we saw eco-systems related to analytics gaining momentum; In 2015 analytics we be a central theme in technology selection and deployment. Tools to provide visibility, trends and usage data will be required to ensure networks don't run into the same challenges related to infrastructure sprawl.

Secure Cloud Interconnects: As more applications are virtualized and moved to the Cloud, and business critical data flows off premises, organizations will need new measures to ensure that data is not compromised. Secure cloud connectivity is emerging as an important consideration for Cloud datacenter design. In 2015, the security factors will also influence the policy considerations for Cloud Architects. Application network services will need to be able to ensure that security policies rules are managed dynamically as workloads move through different domains, to ensure compliance to varying security levels. While data sovereignty continues to be an important topic for organizations, secure cloud interconnects are going to play central role with more workloads and business sensitive data transferring to the Cloud in the new year.

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Harshal Pimpalkhtue is Product Marketing Engineer at A10 Networks. He is the lead for A10 Networks' products and solutions for Cloud IaaS. In this role he interfaces with customers and partners to take to market L4-L7 solutions that help cloud operators navigate technology transitions to Cloud IaaS. He has more than 13 years of experience in software development and product management. Harshal's domain expertise includes Data Center, Enterprise and Service Provider networking solutions.