This year will make history for the global pandemic and the change to all our lives around the globe. I have put together a brief list of the trends and big changes for 2020 and some predictions for 2021. So below here is my list of top trends for 2020 in cloud computing.
Demand for Cloud Services
The global pandemic hit Europe and the US in March and from that point onwards home working became the default office for many of us very suddenly. The growth of Cloud services has increased massively as companies have looked to accelerate their Cloud-first strategy. This has meant a huge growth in the Public Cloud big three – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and Google Cloud. Companies previously used cloud offerings as proof of concept, but now have the cloud adopted in the technology road maps with Hybrid Cloud, Multi-Cloud, and even Private Cloud all being consumed. Companies taking advantage of the likes of SaaS, PaaS, and also DRaaS. The use of Microsoft Office 365 has grown to over 250 Million users and over 75 Million Teams users. Google’s G Suite had an increase in growth over 2018 and 2019, but Microsoft Office 365 has surpassed them
Move to toward DevOps model
In 2020 we have seen an increase in digital transformation projects with the use of Cloud technologies. The move towards DevOps model provides the benefits of agile application development, easier deployment, improved efficiency, and cost savings. DevOps model has adopted modern microservices and serverless architectures.
Growth of Kubernetes and containerization
Kubernetes has come a long way from being the internal Google automation tool. From Wikipedia, Kubernetes is defined as “Kubernetes is an open-source container-orchestration system for automating computer application deployment, scaling, and management. It was originally designed by Google and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation”. All the big three Public Cloud players have a Kubernetes offering now, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and lastly Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Also, virtualization leader VMware has released it’s latest version vSphere 7.0 (VCF with Tanzu) and later vSphere 7.0 Update 1( vSphere with Tanzu). Other recovery and disaster recovery vendors have also moved into enterprise support of Kubernetes with Veeam acquisition of Kasten and also Zerto for Kubernetes (which was revealed at ZertoCon 2020)
VMware announces ESXi on Arm fling
In October virtualization giant VMware announced their flagship product ESXi could run on Arm, as opposed to the traditional ESXI which as designed for x86 hardware. Whilst being only a fling and not in full support, this lead to further development with project Cassini that allows ESXi-Arm to work on a wider range of hardware devices for edge computing and datacentre setups. The most recent development of the ESXi-Arm fling is the ability to run ESXi on Raspberry Pi 4
Predictions for 2021 – Edge Computing will be the new growth area.
Edge Computing or the Internet of Things (IoT) is on the rise. The introduction of 5G mobile networks late in 2019 has now grown worldwide with 73 operators in over 40 countries. 5G provides increased bandwidth to rival that home or office broadband network. The benefits of edge computing include high bandwidth, low latency, data offload, and device processing. Some of the examples of edge computing will be Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR) across industries from healthcare, retail, manufacturing and logistics