Cloud computing in 2018: Switch or die

Cloud computing technology is creating a new and different business opportunity. New things require us to constantly learn and improve our way of operation and even our way of thinking to keep pace with the times in order to develop better. Sticking to the old ways will only lead to elimination. In other words, transform or die.

That’s the powerful, no-nonsense message from Oracle Vice President Ashish Mohindroo and Fast Company co-founder and founder Bill Taylor: Traditional data centers won’t cut it anymore, it’s time to think in a new way, one that won’t replicate the complexity of on-premises deployments and implementations in the cloud.

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A changing era

The IT industry is currently in the midst of a tectonic shift that happens every 20 years, with the move from client/server computing to the Internet in the 1990s being replaced by a transformation to cloud computing. This seismic shift is profound and unavoidable.

Nowadays, no industry can be separated from the Internet. Cloud computing technology is an innovation in the past decade. It is an optimization of the network, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, automatic software, the Internet of Things, and improvements in human interaction interface design.

A potential problem facing enterprises today is that the existing IT infrastructure and strategy are not designed to take advantage of new technologies, support new business models, or conduct adequate management and control, but to complete work quickly, which is the so-called "forcing growth". Traditional data centers are built in an isolated manner, taking into account only maximum capacity and peak load. However, as the amount of information increases and social needs increase, what is maximum capacity and peak load? They are not designed as elastic, comprehensive or flexible networks.

What is more complicated is that each isolated service does not communicate with other services and may be built on different standards, which brings great difficulties to the interconnection between data centers. Therefore, no matter what kind of platform or network, the bottom layer needs to be vendor-neutral and clear: for existing enterprises, they must undergo the necessary cloud basic service transformation: data service (DaaS), software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). These services need to be based on open technologies and standards, including SQL and NoSQL databases. Times are changing, demands are increasing, and innovation and change are needed.

Six paths to cloud deployment

Oracle defines six different paths to the cloud, each with different appeal:

1. Optimize existing local data centers and plan migration.
2. The complete cloud infrastructure is installed behind the firewall. The benefits are security behind the firewall and a pay-as-you-go model.
3. Moving existing workloads to a cloud infrastructure with minimal optimization is often referred to as lift and shift. The main challenge of this popular approach is dealing with less-than-ideal I/O bottlenecks.
4. Create cloud applications developed using PaaS and IaaS technologies to completely replace outdated traditional applications, and DaaS will replace traditional local databases. The advantages of this model include services for application development, data management, analysis, and integration, while supporting virtual machines, containerization for portability, and Kubernetes for orchestration.
5. Replace core legacy applications with subscription-based third-party SaaS applications. Similar to #4, this model provides application development tools for customization, as well as the same AI and machine learning technologies.
6. Choosing a "cloud computing" model would be a reasonable choice for new companies that do not have traditional IT operations or applications.

Change the way you think

IT staff and even everyone needs to expand their horizons and go beyond technology. Are you sure that what you know now will not limit your future imagination? Can you learn as fast as the world changes? Have a deep understanding of the cloud applications you use to build, or learn about each new cloud computing technology and programming language. The world is changing so fast. Looking back 20 years ago, you would never have imagined that today's network world would develop so fast! This requires constantly transforming your thinking and keeping up with the pace of the new era, new innovation, and new changes to remain invincible, otherwise you will only be eliminated by the new era!