Cloud IaaS is not the future

About 1,5 years ago I was writing that Cloud is not the future. Instead, I claimed that it is the present. In fact, most companies are already embracing the Cloud. Today, I want to revisit this statement and take it to the next level: Cloud IaaS is not the Future

What is wrong about Cloud IaaS?

Cloud IaaS was great in the early days of the Cloud. It gave us freedom to move our workloads in a lift-and-shift scenario to the Cloud. Also, it greatly improved how we can handle workloads in a more dynamic way. Adding servers and shutting them down on demand was really easy. In an on-premise scenario, this was far from easy. All big Cloud providers today provide a comprehensive toolset and third-party applications for IaaS solutions. But why is it not as great as it used to be?

Honestly, I was never a big fan of IaaS in the Cloud. To state it blunt, it didn’t improve much (other than scale and flexibility) to an on-premise world. With Cloud IaaS, we still have to maintain all our servers like in the old days with on-premise. Security patches, updates, fixes and alike stays with those that build the services. Since the early days, I was a big fan of Cloud PaaS (Platform as a Service). 

What is the status of Cloud PaaS?

Over the last 1.5 years, a lot of mature Cloud PaaS services emerged. Cloud PaaS has been around for almost 10 years, but the current level of maturity is impressive. Some two years ago, they have mainly been general purpose Services, but now they moved into very specific domains. There are now a lot of services available for things such as IoT or Data Analytics.

The current trend in Cloud PaaS is definitely the move towards „Serverless Analytics“. Analytics has always been a slow-mover when it came to the Cloud. Other functional areas had already Cloud-native implementations, when Analytical workloads were still developed for the on-premise world. Hadoop was one of these projects, but other projects took over and Hadoop is in the decline. Now, more analytical applications will be developed with a PaaS-stack.

What should you do now?

Cloud PaaS isn’t a revolution or anything spectacular new. If you have no experiences with Cloud PaaS, I would urge you to look at these platforms asap. They will become essential for your business and do provide a lot of benefits. Again – it isn’t the future, it is the present!

If you want to learn more about Serverless Analytics, I can recommend you this tutorial. (Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Udemy!)