Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2020. Read them in this 12th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Spencer Kimball, co-founder and CEO of Cockroach Labs
Portable Services Come of Age in the Cloud
In 2018, we predicted the multi-cloud approach would become an elevated priority for database decision-makers at global companies. This shift was caused by the increased risk associated with several large corporations in different industries (i.e finance, health, education, government) concentrating too much of their resources with a small cohort of cloud providers (i.e. AWS, Azure, GCP). Imagine the havoc that would ensue if even one of these cloud providers experienced a major collapse. When considering cloud infrastructure, industry decision-makers should apply the same resiliency measures and contingency planning that they practice with their day-to-day business.
The cloud market is growing at approximately $200 billion a year and enterprises are expected to push that past the $1T mark. This growth is being fueled by enterprises that historically resisted the public cloud. Now that these companies see its value, they are embracing the cloud to take advantage of its cost savings, efficiency, and resilience.
Cloud concentration risks are high and can result in a single point of failure. Simply put, if a cloud fails all business activities come to a grinding halt. As a consequence, the one cloud fits all formula for public cloud vendors (which has worked well for companies in the growth segment) does not necessarily resonate with big enterprises. Companies ultimately want to use THE public cloud because it will give their business the resilience and up times that meet their needs. This is anathema to enterprise companies. Enterprises demand services that are portable across clouds, and I believe they’ll get what they want because their spend is so significant.
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About the Author
Spencer Kimball is the co-founder and CEO of Cockroach Labs, where he maintains a delicate balance between a love for programming distributed systems and the excitement of helping the company grow smoothly. While in university, he was one of the original authors of the GIMP. He cut his teeth on databases during the dot com heyday, and had a front row seat at Google for a decade’s worth of their evolution.
