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We are reading in these last days of the end of the year and the first days of the new year numerous articles about economic forecasts and the development of cloud computing for the new year, again 2013 as for about two years now (in Italy) should be the year of affirmation of Cloud Computing.

Some big names declare that the Cloud is now on the top; it is said that it will create millions of new jobs (IDCs), that companies around the world are looking for professionals with skills on the Cloud, here perhaps a rereading of one of our pieces can be beneficial.

We are talking about a market of increasingly large figures, now decisive figures for the economies of countries, but in our opinion it is necessary to consider that it will be the business world that will drive the development of the Public Cloud, while the IT departments will be the driving force of the Private Cloud world.

Some articles try to predict what the areas of development of Cloud Computing will be, we also try to make predictions.

• Growth of user-oriented providers, in this case we mean the cloud market such as dropbox, ibox, icloud, sugarsync and many other consumer-oriented online storage systems in synchronization mode with mobile and desktop devices and with sharing features.
• An increase in the use of Public IaaS Clouds by large enterprises, but only as small testing projects or strategic and temporary for certain scheduled marketing launches.
• Greater affirmation and growth of standards such as CloudStack, OpenStack and all those who will use these technologies as a provider, see HP IBM
• Intersection of BigData and Cloud IaaS in some PaaS offerings, such as AWS’s recent RedShift , which in association with their partner Jaspersoft provide a respectable turnkey solution.
• Growth of the Hybrid Cloud, especially in Italy, the reuse of the installed HW in increasingly strong automatic integration with the large Public Clouds. Here the current players such as Eucalyptus, Nebula, CloudScaling, VMware will be the masters.
• The boundary between IaaS and PaaS will be increasingly blurred and PaaS platforms will be increasingly mobile-oriented to allow easy development and deployment of apps on mobile devices in complete integration with networked data and services.
• Security, Governance and Privacy, will be targeted continuously, the most visionary law firms are already gearing up to help businesses and PAs. The European Commission, with the European Cloud Partnership , is planning and planning a greater presence of the old continent in this too US-centric market.
• The Cloud will soon benefit from SDN, Software Defined Network, a further software abstraction of the network layer, increasingly towards complete network virtualization. A technology that has OpenFlow as its key heart. The development of SDN will bring enormous benefits to those who have to administer datacenters by reducing complexity, but at the same time it will open new unimaginable frontiers, which only the most skilled networkers can imagine. For example, for those who are familiar with VMware’s Distributed Switches, imagine seeing the same vSwitch distributed across several distant locations, imagine them as simplifications for hot migrations of virtual machines between two different regions.
• By now the boundary between systems engineers and developers must necessarily be reduced, the Public Cloud reduces the room for manoeuvre for hard-working system engineers, but allows new specializations and growth of know-how to the two figures. Universities will have to forge new engineers who are better prepared in networking, storage, and distributed services. Soon they will have to consider new programming languages to develop in the Cloud, as for example the PACE project funded by the European Research Council (“Programming abstractions for applications in cloud environments”) intends to do.
• We expect a development of the theme of Interoperability between Cloud Providers, here the standardization of the Cloud will be important. Making it easy to migrate virtual instances, and data stored in large data storage systems, this will open up competition and new logics of high availability or dynamic brokering.
• GreenIT, a topic very dear to us, is already focusing a lot on the beating hearts of the Cloud, the Datacenters, here virtualization, cooling, and automatic Power Management of systems will be the key variables for good energy efficiency. Power Management will have to see new algorithms which, however, will have to consider two aspects that have not been considered so far, the consumption values of the physical resource must be linked to the nature of the applications and to the logic of learning and load prediction. For example, there are already systems monitoring tools that store the load of a service/system and alert operators if a given service/system is not overloaded similarly to the same previous period, such as the previous day, reporting it as an anomaly that may suggest some failure or malfunction.
• There is a need for greater responsibility and clear and international penalties for Public Cloud Providers, it is no longer allowed to go down a service in a datacenter, it is not plausible that a storm or a malfunction of a service puts an entire datacenter at risk, redundancy must be a guaranteed feature by default and specified in contracts, Instead, the customer must be able to choose lower reliability in order to save money. Cloud Providers will need to be more transparent about the sw/hw technologies used to offer their services. Often certain services are based on projects developed internally, thus constituting an intellectual property and a competitive advantage that cannot be disclosed, but since these services have to be used by customers, knowing how they have been designed, what equipment is used, what maintenance is done, what load tests, etc., can increase customer trust.
• Marketplaces will play a key role in the development of the adoption of Cloud Computing, here by apps we mean preconfigured and pre-installed systems of certain opensource projects (in general) with minimal assistance plans. The customer may very well be a non-expert who simply has to create his own account on the provider and choose the apps of his interest. It is also very interesting for professionals who can thus save time and provide customers with turnkey solutions.