The future of cloud innovation
Date: July 9, 2015
Name: The future of cloud innovation
Presenter: Adrian Cockcroft
Leaders must understand that the trend of cloud innovation will transform the business world today. Moreover, leaders should take the advantage this innovation. The Dun & Bradstreet Cloud Innovation Centre invites Adrian Cockcroft, the former Netflix Chief Architect of Cloud Services, to discuss the prediction how world of business industry will integrate the cloud applications. In this presentation, leaders will learn the concept of cloud innovation and his perspective of future transformation. Leaders in the Information Technology industry, especially software engineering, will benefit the most in this presentation.
Adrian Cockcroft is the former Netflix Chief Architect of Cloud Services. He is considered as one of the early pioneer of public cloud technology. With over many years of developing cloud innovation, he is one of the world most visible person in cloud computing. Adrain Cockcroft speaks in many conferences and also the author of many books related to his industry. Moreover, he is one of the founders of eBay Research Labs, and technical fellow of Venture Capital Firm, Battery Ventures.
Adrain Cockcroft explains the world is adapting the concept of cloud innovation. During the adoption stage, the world ignores the possibility to integrate cloud into their business. Cockcroft shares Netflix is one of the early companies that integrates the technology of cloud. The adoption is still in progress. When more people start to try the application, cloud computing raise the awareness. Furthermore, everyone is on the road map in 2015.
Cockcroft later joins Battery Ventures to expand the awareness since more audiences are interested in the cloud. His job is to explore the disruption and opportunities to mature the concept of cloud innovation.
Cockcroft believes the enterprise infrastructure as a service (IaaS) has 4 concerns. The first concern is staying power, which is to maintain and monitor the infrastructure. The second concern is the support, which is able to create the helping aid for the organization. The third concern is the size and the last concern is the location. Cockcroft suggests two largest open sources for enterprise IaaS. They are Amazon Web Service (AWS) and Azure. Based on the geographical region, AWS is 5 times more than everyone else combine. Cockcroft predicts within one year, the size will increase to 10 times, which will capture 91% of the market.
There are other future expansions for other open sources. Google might be the next competition and AWS will focus in the India market.
Cockcroft emphasizes from 2013 to 2015, the number of sites host increase significantly. The growth indicates the world is adopting the cloud technology and it has become a requirement for future business.
The cloud technology will focus on 3 major elements.
- Agility
- Functionality
- Cost savings
Cockcroft believes people need cloud to build the next big thing. Cloud technology can help business speed up the process, flexible with multilevel functions, and it is cheaper to shut down.
Cockcroft mentions platform as a service (PaaS) is also the next trend for business. PaaS will focus on container, communication, orchestration, and policy. Cockcroft suggests business should look into Docker or OpenStack as their options to integrate PaaS because they will be the new standard for business.
Using a docker is a low cost for enterprise, such as compile builds in seconds, package dependencies, and docker startup.
“Venders will co-opt and fragment OpenStack”
As for Software as a Service (SaaS), Cockcroft indicates it is everywhere because it is a standard for enterprise. However, leaders must be aware of the future disruption. As installation increases, the revenue will increase. Until a certain point, the revenue will start to diminish.
2014 is the year where enterprise embraced the cloud and developers. The key goals for cloud and developers are to align with the information technology in business and try not to get breached. Many people are experiencing the security blanket failure, which is not able to trust firewall anymore. Cockcroft believes developers have the responsibility to get faster, cheaper and safer. Operators have the responsibility to automate the API platform.
Product development process
The product development process is a cycle of innovation, big data, culture and then cloud. This means it is a continuous delivery of observe, orient, decide, and then act. Cockcroft suggests instead of using monolithic delivery method, the product team should use microservice method.
Monolithic method is when there is a release plan, the plan goes to all developers. After that, it goes to QA integration then replace the old with new release. This method works well with small company with small numbers of developers because it is a simple and linear structure. However, if there is bug, it will delay the process.
Microservice method is different from monolithic method. It releases many plans to many developers. When developers finish, it will start deploy the feature to production. This method will not block anyone if there is any delay because each plan is independent. This method requires monitoring tool to ensure if any microservice is fixed when there is non function.
Monitoring -> site reliability -> available matrix
Cockcroft also suggests business to put managers or VP engineering above developers for productivity. In addition, if there is a change, microservice method is better off to change one thing at a time.
Microservice method can also help oriented loosely coupled services with bounded context. Cockcroft shows 4 major coupling concerns.
- Convey’s law
- centralized database scheme
- enterprise service bus
- inflexible protocol versioning
With using microservice method, the flow can be challenging. Therefore testing can be expensive. Cockcroft suggests a tool called “Build Spigo Program” to simulate the microservice.
Questions and Answers
Cockcroft believes feedback is important. Cloud can help business in planning because cloud’s purpose is to optimize speed. However, business must be aware that implementing cloud can create culture shock challenge.
Reviewing the code is also important. In business, it is important to allow each other to know the code so they can support. Cloud is international, so the infrastructure can be misleading. Cockcroft believes as long as business follow the traffic, they will find the right location to host on the cloud.
Cockcroft shares 5 years ago, people thought cloud technology is not secured and people were crazy to implement this idea. Now, people can see the simplicity of using the cloud and they believe cloud can be secured.
Cockcroft hopes the next generation can develop a software to reduce the abuse comments on social media. There should be a law reinforcement on that issue. Traditionally, people need to purchase the software to learn and train the skills. Now, people can use AWS to retrieve information for low cost. Cockcroft can see the increase trend in the financial industry. In addition, many organizations still decide not to use cloud because of bad experience, money problem and too large of scale to fit into cloud. More importantly, if there is not enough growth in business, the organizations will not consider using cloud.