Hostage to fortune

So in my previous blog I provided my thoughts from the Cloud World Forum event. During that event I was asked what I believed the cloud market would be like in 5-10 years time. Well I had a stab at an answer at the time but I've had more time to think now and I think I'd revise my answer a little. As much as I hate offering up a hostage to fortune, I think it may be fun to check back in a year or two to see just how wrong I am :o)

First things first. I'll be using the NIST definitions for cloud computing - check them out, they're good and they're vendor-independent. [One beef I did have with the speakers at the Cloud WF was that they all insisted on giving us their own definition of cloud computing. We really should be over that by now... Particularly when they all mentioned the Internet and then a number went on to talk about private clouds.]

Let's have some initial assumptions:

i) IaaS will become more interoperable and portable - either provider-supported through the use of standard APIs (check out http://www.occi-wg.org) or by default through meta-cloud providers reverse engineering closed APIs.

ii) PaaS and SaaS vendors will have a big question to answer around the granularity of the services that they offer.

iii) Consumers will have some serious thinking to do with respect to the amount of lock-in (and subsequent pricing consequences) they are willing to endure.

So in my future IaaS will become seriously commoditised with consumers able to switch loads or other basic IT needs as and when necessary through the use of meta-clouds or other mechanisms for managing multiple cloud providers. I think that's a given. [I'm not going to talk about private or community clouds much in this post, let's just assume that most internal IT systems will be delivered by either private or community cloudy resources - let's face it, there's not much that won't be virtualised in 5 years time other than the obvious usual suspects, y'know those guys still running Cobol on legacy kit...]

The PaaS and SaaS space is much more interesting. In an ideal world, these kinds of providers would completely open up and offer very granular services, presumably charged per transaction or subscription, that consumers could use on a per-service basis from outside of the provider environment. Enabling SOA via cloud services. That would be good. What I fear is that PaaS providers in particular will be very close minded in their thinking and actually encourage the PaaS lock-in that has many cloud commentators (including this one) worried. Why would they do this? Well, once a consumer is effectively locked-in there'll be every temptation to start upping the prices - as long as the pain to the consumer is less than migrating away from the PaaS it's a definite win for the provider. Ah, but competition will prevent this I hear you say. Well, only if the competition isn't doing the same thing!

So that's my view of how the future will pan out. Anyone care to share theirs?