Almost every year for the past 15 years I have religiously visited the MWC (Mobile World Congress) in Barcelona. This year, among the massive booths of the Samsungs and the HTCs with their shiny new gadgets, one booth stood out — that of the orange clad Ubuntu. I could not help noticing the number of people who dropped by and the length of time they spent reviewing and learning more about Ubuntu’s Cloud management efforts.
It made me realize that I was not among the few who recognised the value of the massive changes sweeping the world of Systems Administration or what is nowadays in hip speech — “DevOps”. The DevOps revolution is lost among the more easily understandable revolutions in Big Data and its predictive powers, IoT, Self-Driving Cars and 3D Printing. This is what I call the Revolution that will not be Televised.
Originating from automated testing and continuous integration principles of Agile development, DevOps and Cloud Management Solutions have taken a life of their own. And in many ways their value is probably more easily recognized by enterprises some of which even today sometimes do not “get” the Agile methodology.
The DevOps revolution gives CIOs an incredible opportunity with its triumvirate of Virtualization, Containerisation and Orchestration tools combined with scripted configuration management tools such as Chef, Puppet and Ansible. Together they present an opportunity to not only optimize the budgets of internal-data centers by moving them to the Cloud, but equally importantly allow easy migration between cloud hosting providers avoiding the much feared “lock-in”.
Cloud Hosting providers who have invested heavily in automation through basing themselves off platforms such as CloudStack (as in the case of Safe Swiss Cloud) are also investing in building out the support systems dedicated to leveraging fast moving DevOps technologies to support their customers in migrating to the cloud. Skills that internal-IT administrators or traditional IT support companies have not had enough exposure to.
The opportunity provided to CIOs in migrating their hosting to public, private and hybrid clouds is definitely not the only one of interest.
The emergence of Cloud Management Solutions together with the Snowden Affair is also giving rise to a new need for CIOs to ensure data security and privacy to their customers at unprecedented levels. A need that will challenge the hegemony (an intentionally selected phrase) of the Big 3 Cloud Hosting players — Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
I believe that the next few years will see the rise of a Hosting 3.0 where smaller Cloud Hosting Providers armed with an arsenal of advanced technology and highly protective corporate structures will proliferate in order to ensure a higher quality of service and greater security for enterprises — particularly in Europe.
This is, in my opinion, the Macro Revolution in providing software services that is gathering steam and will sweep across the globe in the coming years — Private and Hybrid Cloud based software services delivered through highly specialised and localised Cloud Hosting Providers. The revolution will not be televised.
