Driven by the global pandemic, the digital transformation of numerous sectors has taken shape in 2021 at unprecedented speed and scale, with the cloud cementing itself as the central pillar on which the digital world is built. In fact, in 2021, the global cloud market has met analyst predictions that it will grow 10-fold by 2030 (compared to 2020).
The growing reliance on cloud technologies has also brought increased pressure and scrutiny on the industry. Both existing and new players expect the cloud industry to continue to rush in developing new solutions and responding to today’s technical, practical, and social challenges.
Scaleway’s cloud technology experts analyze five trends in cloud innovation that companies and providers must take into account in 2022:
Multicloud will Continue to Grow
Multicloud, or the use of multiple cloud providers instead of relying on just one, will gain momentum in 2022 as players become increasingly aware of the risks of putting all their eggs in one basket.
Major vendor outages have caused a lot of headaches for customers, as demonstrated by the vast AWS outage, with consequences around the world.
The multi-cloud trend will allow for more choice, price arbitrage, and risk management, both geopolitical and resiliency. In addition, the promise of ensuring business continuity while reducing costs will also establish multi-cloud as the status quo.
Users Don’t want to Deal with Servers
The adoption of modern cloud architecture abstraction will continue to progress rapidly in containers, with Kubernetes in particular and serverless services.
According to Gartner, by 2025, 85% of enterprises will be running containers in their performance, up from less than 30% in 2020. This growth in container adoption points to the scalability and flexibility of the architecture, increasingly demanded qualities.
Reducing costs and complexity will allow for more efficient use of resources and speed up efficient work, as will spend less time managing technology.
Cloud Architecture will be Increasingly Modular
As technology needs to develop and new applications are required, cloud architecture will need to become increasingly modular to support as-yet-unknown applications and product ecosystems to work well together.
As emerging technologies take hold, the size of the cloud microservices market is expected to triple between 2020 and 2026. In addition, IDC’s 2018 prediction that 90% of applications will have microservices architecture is expected to in 2022 become a reality.
To develop modular container or Serverless architectures, the focus will be increased on connecting “glue” products, such as the message queue or observability, which will make the difference.
AI will Unlock Massive Potential
Artificial Intelligence and robotics are transforming healthcare, as well as other sectors. However, to take advantage of this potential, it will be necessary to resort to centralized cloud solutions and edge computing since deploying local servers for resource-intensive research will entail too high a cost. Cloud providers will have to meet this challenge by offering increasingly efficient solutions from an energy point of view.
Open Source as a Generator of Balance
Open source will be positioned as the ideal solution to provide a level playing field. As the software community moves further and further away from products based on intellectual property and patents, the barriers to entry are lowered significantly, thus opening the doors to people and companies with fewer resources, be they start-ups, companies early-stage, non-profit organizations, organizations from developing countries, etc.
“All of these predictions tell us of significant advances and changes in the world of IT that will have direct results in how we live, work, and interact.
They may or may not be fulfilled, but if there is something that we can be clear about, we are on the precipice of a significant digital transformation worldwide. That great change will be appeased, to a large extent, by cloud technologies and their developments and innovations future,” says Yann Lechelle, CEO of Scaleway.
