It should be no surprise to hear that the Enterprise has adopted the cloud and the cloud market is growing. According to RightScale’s 2017 State of the Cloud survey, 95% of respondents are using the cloud in some form (public, private, or hybrid). At the GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit in June, Morgan Stanley Executive Director, Brian Nowak, said the cloud market will be close to a $350 billion market by 2020.
Acknowledging the firm establishment of the cloud within the Enterprise, at Blueprint’s June Next Big Thing Happy Hour (NBT), we focused on understanding what the future of cloud computing may be and steps the Enterprise can take in order to get there today. We had an incredible panel that included folks from Blueprint Consulting, Google, Chef, and Centeris:
- Nell Shamrell-Harrington: A Software Development Engineer at Chef and core maintainer of the Habitat and Supermarket open source projects. She also sits on the advisory board for the University of Washington Certificates in Ruby Programming and DevOps.
- David Aronchick: The Senior Product Manager for the Google Container Engine, and leads product management on behalf of Google for Kubernetes. David has been helping to ship software for nearly 20 years, founding and being part of the management team for three different startups, as well as squeezing in time at Microsoft, Amazon, Chef, and now Google.
- Mousa Hamad: An IT Operations Manager at Blueprint Consulting Services, a full-service technical consulting firm in Bellevue, WA. He specializes in transforming businesses through IT and cloud solutions while providing world class support. Mousa has helped companies leverage technology in multiple industries, including direct IT support for Paul Allen at Vulcan.
- Nick Schlumpf: is an Information Technology professional with a passion of making things work. He is with Centeris, a colocation facility in Puyallup, where he manages their relationships with integrators and resellers and other partners in the Pacific Northwest.
(Pictured R to L: Nell Shamrell-Harrington, David Aronchick, Gary Nakanelua, Mousa Hamad and Nick Schlumpf)
I had the distinct pleasure to moderate this panel of thought leaders as they shared and discussed the future of cloud computing through the lens of infrastructure automation, containerization technology, cloud budgets, security and co-location services. The full panel will be available online soon, but here are some highlights:
- Nell shared a vision of application automation. The emphasis is to “take an application, package it in a way that it will run agnostically,” so that it runs on any environment you may have. The amazing breakthrough here is that companies can be completely cloud agnostic, taking advantage of cost savings and avoiding vendor lock-in.
- David spoke at length about containers, noting that “A container gives you everything you need to run your application in a hermetically sealed package that you can move anywhere you want and its got all its dependencies.” The future of cloud computing will find more companies orchestrating large numbers of containers that separate the running of workloads from their data and breaking things down into microservices.
- Mousa noted the biggest gap he has seen from cloud infrastructure providers is getting visibility and gaining control over budgeting. As he noted, “don’t forget about us Ops guys that have to worry about budget.”
- Nick talked about the value of co-location services, “You can take legacy gear, increase return on investment for what you’ve already spent and use great software to essentially revive it”. He also noted the importance “to look at not just the live data where it is today, but also where you’re going to be maybe backing stuff up and archiving it and making sure you’re not so locked in to some of these typical solutions.”
Throughout the evening, we discussed a number of tools, technologies and resources:
- Habitat, an open source project from Chef. More information is available at https://www.habitat.sh/
- Kubernetes – https://kubernetes.io/.
- Chaos Monkey, a tool that randomly terminates a service in a group – https://github.com/Netflix/SimianArmy/wiki/Chaos-Monkey
- The 2017 State of Cloud Adoption and Security report, found at https://www.mcafee.com/us/solutions/lp/cloud-security-report.html.
- Nell, noting the importance of empowerment and a shared purpose, gave a glowing recommendation of the book, “Team of Teams”, available on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Team-Teams-Rules-Engagement-Complex/dp/1591847486
- David noted it was important to get “a view outside of the bubble we live in” and suggested the RadioLab podcast, available at http://www.radiolab.org/
- Mousa recommended the book “Tools of Titans”, available on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Tools-Titans-Billionaires-World-Class-Performers/dp/1328683788
- Nick recommended a book named “Tunnels.” He felt Seattle is in a tough place because “we are 20 to 1 behind Portland for cables coming from Asia. 5 years ago, it was 5 to 1.”
The Next Big Thing Happy Hour is always a great time. After all, where else can you see “Bacon as a Service” get ideated in front of you?
