Cloud is not the future
Now you probably think: is Mario crazy? In fact, during this post, I will explain why cloud is not the future.
First, let’s have a look at the economic facts of the cloud. If we look at share prices of companies providing cloud services, it is rather easy to say: those shares are skyrocketing! (Not mentioning recent drops in some shares, but these are rather market dynamics than real valuations). One thing is also about overall company performances: the income of companies providing cloud services increased a lot. Have a look at the major cloud providers such as AWS, Google, Oracle or Microsoft: they make quite a lot of their revenue now with cloud services. So, obviously here, my initial statement seems to be wrong. So why did I just choose this one? Still crazy?
Let’s look at another explanation on this: it might be all about technology, right? I was recently playing with AWS API Gateway and AWS Lambda. Wow, how easy is it to write a great API? I could program an API for an Android APP in some hours, deployment was easy. Remember back when you first had to deploy your full stack for this? Make sure to have all libraries set up and alike? Another sample: Data Analytics. Currently, much of this is moving from “classical” Hadoop-backed HDFS to decoupled Architectures (Object Stores as “Data Lake” and Spark for Compute/Analytics). This is also a clear favour for the Cloud, because both can be scaled individually and utilisation is easier to handle. When you need more compute power, you would spin up new instances and disconnect them again when you are done. This simply can’t be done with on-prem or private cloud, since the available capacity is calculated to match some corporate requirements. Also this is clearly in favour of the Cloud.
But what else? Let’s look at how new Applications or Services are developed. Nowadays, almost every Service is developed “Cloud first”, which means that they aren’t available without the cloud or at least they get available at a very late stage / substantial delay. So if you want to stay ahead in the innovation, it is necessary to embrace cloud here. And please don’t tell me that you would rather wait as it isn’t necessary to be with the first one’s to move. Answer: of course it is fine to wait until your business is dead ;).
So, there are no real points against the cloud, so why did I then formulate the title like this? Provocation? Clickbaiting? NO: Cloud is not the future, it is the present!