Compute Trend in 2020

In this article, we’ll discuss the latest trend in cloud computing from major cloud providers including AWS, Azure and GCP. It’s impossible to explore each topic in great details in a single article so the focus of this article is to highlight distinct features from each cloud provider on relevant technology. The author expects to continue in-depth technical analysis on each technology in subsequent articles.

Multi-Cloud and Hybrid-Cloud

No customer wants to permanently lock-in their IT infrastructure with a particular cloud provider. Some customers want highest availability with their services and the distribution or replication of the workload among multiple clouds is very appealing as historically there has never been simultaneous regional failures in all three major cloud providers, i.e., AWS, Azure and GCP.

Many enterprise customers already invest significantly in their own data centers in the past few decades and it’s not economical to abandon their investment over the years and completely move their workload to the cloud. In addition many institutions, banks, schools, military, and government customers cannot move their data to the cloud due to compliance requirements. It’s not uncommon some customers are willing to deploy non-critical services in the clouds while running sensitive services in their own infrastructure. Actually hybrid is a natural state for enterprise customers migrating to the cloud as it’s infeasible to move all their services to the cloud in one step.

To accommodate the needs for those customers, in recent years all major cloud providers have ramped up their support on multiple clouds and hybrid environments. Specifically:

Enable cloud services running in customer’s own data centers or infrastructures

Enable cloud services running in competitor’s cloud environments

Enable cloud services running in hybrid environments with various connectivity strategies

Google Cloud Function

2020