This year, a Twitter conversation erupted, leading to Streamlio’s Jon Bock accusing cloud giants of skimping on R&D and instead, trying to optimize existing infrastructures to maximize profits. Bock’s point is that Microsoft’s Azure was released almost 10 years ago, and Google Cloud and Amazon AWS nearly 15 years ago with few major upgrades to the main infrastructure of these cloud applications.
However, as the open-source community continues to grow, smaller companies have been taking on the heavy lifting by innovating applications that work within the mainframes of these cloud giants. Expanding R&D beyond the host-companies allows for a much more diverse hive-mind of developers. Some may operate on multiple systems and code in multiple languages and can use this insight to spur more creative innovations for the cloud community as a whole. Meaning, innovation in the cloud is still very much alive, but it’s the smaller companies building up the giants.
To understand more about these cloud computing trends, Digital Journal spoke with Grant Kirkwood, CTO of Unitas Global.
Digital Journal: How important is cloud computing becoming for businesses?
Grant Kirkwood: Cloud computing has become the norm for most businesses. While cloud computing has been available for several years, hybrid cloud computing is a newer concept combining one or more cloud providers. If you’re running a company that has an IT department and you use a managed cloud computing service, you don’t have to worry about maintaining the system yourself. All of this is done for you. This is how nearly all enterprises are running their businesses today.
DJ: Some experts say major cloud computing providers aren’t investing in R&D, and instead, smaller, innovative providers are filling in the R&D space. Do you agree?
Kirkwood: I would disagree. The major cloud computing providers are making huge investments in R&D.
On the surface it may not look like they are because these companies have really active acquisitions arms in which they acquire smaller, creative startups, and then integrate their products into their own platform. So, the public tends to believe all of the innovation is being done by these startups — But, that’s only a surface-level observation. In reality, if you took the sum of innovations created by smaller players, they are only a small fraction of what the major cloud providers have spent in R&D.
Further, you have to remember that as major cloud providers are gobbling up smaller providers, they’re not just buying them for the innovative technology they created — they are buying them for the people. Once they’ve acquired that talent, they can really put some creative fuel behind what they’re doing.
DJ: Are the major providers innovating in the cloud computing space?
Kirkwood: Annual conferences have also made it apparent that the major cloud providers — Google, AWS, and Microsoft — are making strides in innovation. For example, at AWS re:Invent, around one hundred new products are released. In addition, AWS sends monthly emails to its users with a roundup of fifty or more new products that have been released in just the last few weeks. Just one of these innovations could be a startup’s entire business. This is a testament to the level of investment that major cloud providers are making in R&D.
DJ: What types of things are being developed to improve cloud computing?
Kirkwood: A lot of innovations are aimed at making it easier to build or migrate applications to the cloud. And, the tools that are being used to lift and shift legacy tools to the cloud are getting more and more sophisticated.
Additionally, cloud providers are creating solutions to make traditional workloads, that are monolithic in nature and architecture, able to take advantage of cloud-native technologies. This allows companies to leverage the flexibility of cloud without building the applications from scratch.
