Two cloud trends that could kill vendor lock-in once and for all
Ever since somebody first punched a card, customers of enterprise technology products and services have had a love/hate relationship with their vendors. The productivity gains enabled by modern information technology have transformed our economy, but that technology often saddles companies with complicated and expensive hardware and software that, once it becomes indispensible to a business model, becomes almost impossible to ditch when something better comes along down the road.
It’s called lock-in, and it has been frustrating tech customers for a very long time. But now a new generation of enterprise software and services companies promises to break that lock-in cycle by delivering their products over the internet, theoretically making it easy to switch between different providers. And the rise of containers as the building blocks of an application development strategy could further enable the promise of interoperability.
In practice, breaking the lock is probably going to be way more complicated than that. But these are issues we plan to unpack in just two weeks at Structure 2015. Scheduled for November 18th and 19th at the Julia Morgan Ballroom in downtown San Francisco, Structure is our annual conversation on the trends that are shaping the cloud computing industry, and in talking to speakers and attendees over the last month, the promise of cloud interoperability to avoid vendor lock-in is something that this community is following very closely.
It’s still pretty early, but some people are starting to get a little worried about the market power that Amazon Web Services is amassing in 2015. The company’s amazing financial performance over the year has demonstrated that AWS has done very well expanding its customer base beyond the Silicon Valley startup scene and into IT departments around the world. Along with that growth, Amazon is starting to focus more on expanding the number of features it makes available to its customers, such as tools designed to make it easier to get workloads off of legacy software and into AWS’s cloud.
That strategy makes a lot of sense, and is likely welcomed by many AWS customers. But with each new feature, AWS makes it a little bit harder to move workloads away from its clouds to services like Microsoft’s Azure or Google Cloud Platform. And, of course, Microsoft and Google are implementing many of the same features, despite lacking the scale AWS enjoys.
As Fortune’s Barb Darrow noted last month after AWS Re:Invent, even though AWS has been a “benevolent dictator” in the eyes of one customer, a dictator is still a dictator. If you’re using Amazon’s basic services, lock-in is easier to avoid, but once you start layering in those new features, something called “data gravity” sets in.
There are two trends that could prevent the 21st century of enterprise software from resembling the 20th. One of them, which Structure Head of Content Derrick Harris discussed a few months ago, is the container, a white-hot topic in software development.
Containers allow developers to slice their apps into many different pieces that can be run across multiple servers, and those servers could theoretically be located across multiple cloud providers. In practice, it’s still tricky, and most of the people we’ve talked to seem to be mostly experimenting with containers as opposed to using them in production. But there has been a surge in interest in containers and Docker, the company most aligned with container services at the moment. (We’ll have Marianna Tessel, senior vice president of engineering for Docker, at Structure 2015.)
The other trend that could accelerate interoperability is the hybrid cloud. As more and more companies buy in to the idea of the public cloud, they’re finding there are certain applications or workloads they just can’t bear to let out of their clutches. While there are outliers like Structure 2015 speaker Chris Drumgoole of GE, who told us earlier this year that GE doesn’t see any reason to run modern applications anywhere but the public cloud, Gartner thinks demand for hybrid cloud services is about to skyrocket.
That means that hybrid cloud customers could use public cloud services only for specific applications or workloads that they know will be easy to transfer to another service provider, or for spikes in demand. And then if something changes and one’s public cloud vendor became annoying, you’d still have your own datacenters to rely upon.
This whole subject is admittedly a little premature, given how new the public cloud is to many companies and how easily startups have scaled on a single public cloud provider without issues. But if history shows us anything, it’s that success changes companies and business models, and Structure has always sought to host conversations that get you ready for those changes.
Catch Tessel and Drumgoole’s appearances at Structure 2015 on November 18th at the Julia Morgan Ballroom in San Francisco. You can find more information here, and you can buy your tickets here. Act today: the price goes up tomorrow, Nov. 5th!
