In last year’s JAXenter Technology Trends Survey , we asked readers about their interest in different technologies and, according to the results, the cloud was a very relevant topic for developers. As you can see in the figure below, cloud computing was the runner-up in the “General IT topics” section, after software architecture.
JAXenter Technology Trends Survey 2017: Results
If you want to read more about respondents’ favorite and least favorite cloud platforms, have a look at theresults. Sure, cloud computing was already very popular but these results put things into perspective for us; in 2017, respondents were more interested in cloud computing than in microservices, DevOps, machine learning, blockchain and the list goes on. That may or may not still be the case, but these results opened our appetite for everything cloud-related.
Despite cloud computing’s popularity,there are still a lot of unknowns, misunderstandings and gaps. For example, earlier this year, we learned fromSumo Logic’s 2018 Global Security Trends in the Cloud report that almost half of their respondents reported that current tools do not work in the cloud. Furthermore, a whopping 97% out of the 300+ respondents felt that they lacked the tools for proper cloud security. Read more about the reporthere.
The bottom line is that cloud computing is worth exploring and the benefits definitely outweigh the risks. This is what we think but of course, we’re no experts. Therefore, we decided to invite 12 experts to weigh in on the present and future of cloud computing.
A tour of cloud computing will be published twice a week.Here are the interviews published so far Abby Kearns : “It’s very important for technology to be cloud-compatible, if not cloud-native” Oleg Chunikhin & Terry Shea : “Serverless is another step towards improving productivity, especially in DevOps and operations” Peter Meulbroek : “Cloud-neutral adds a large amount of complexity and risk to a migration, without really solving the issue” Ross Kukulinski : “Observability is an essential component when successfully operating software in the cloud” Carlos Sanchez : “A seamless multi-cloud experience is currently practically impossible” Ben Newton : “Kubernetes is crucial for widespread multi-cloud adoption” Shiven Ramji : “The next step is to make integrations between cloud services as easy as possible” Brian Johnson : “Cloud-based infrastructure by itself doesn’t deliver huge benefits” Vince Arneja : “The Fn project is one technology to watch out for as it has great potential” Jeff Keyes : “Serverless is the natural evolution of microservices”
Our next guest isJohn Mathon, CEO of Agile Stacks . JAXenter: What benefits does a cloud-based infrastructure bring? What are the drawbacks?John Mathon: This is an issue, but the cloud gives us a lot of tools for producing better security. If you look at the statistics, many of the intrusions that have happened over the past couple of years are related to private data centers as opposed to the cloud.
Cloud infrastructure is instituting better practices for everything. For instance, there are tools that will scan websites or services for security vulnerabilities. Other tools let you isolate services effectively in the cloud. A lot of things can be done.
Here is another example. You can do two-factor authentication for your sites, and big companies do it, but I’ve noticed a lot of sites don’t. If you leverage things like that, then you have a more secure site in the cloud than you can have locally on-premise.
Doing DevOps first or doing a CI/CD chain into the cloud can result in up to 13 times the agility that you get in a normal enterprise development environment. JAXenter:Has GDPR affected the way you or your organization does things?John Mathon: Well, GDPR for Agile Stacks is a great thing because we make it easier to deploy data and services across many different regions on stacks. One of the primary things you have to do with GDPR is break your services in multiple services located in different countries and isolate that data. GDPR no longer allows companies to get away with running one instance of something and have everyone go to one site. Essentially installations of the data, if not your service, must be located in multiple countries, which means many stacks must be deployed in many different countries. It also requires changes to the application itself.
The value of Agile Stacks comes in helping people build stacks that can be deployed many times over reliably in different environments over and over again, as well as maintained and upgraded in the multiple environments. There is a lot of additional cost with having multiple instances of your infrastructure whether it’s the data or the rest of your services.
JAXenter: What benefits does a cloud-based infrastructure bring? What are the drawbacks?John Mathon: One of the things that we try to do with cloud-based infrastructure is to enable a lot of agility, meaning changing it frequently. People have shown that doing DevOps first or doing a CI/CD chain into the cloud can result in up to 13 times the agility that you get in a normal enterprise development environment.
The cloud provides flexible infrastructure that you can deploy into using DevOps in a way that you can’t always do in an on-premises environment because you don’t have the software infrastructure that you need. Once you’re in the cloud, you can leverage its flexibility to deploy things much quicker, in a much more agile way, and much more frequently to meet customer demands.
Another huge advantage is that cloud