Trending: 3 Phases of Cloud Computing

There are three major trends in cloud computing today, starting with the adoption of cloud computing for production systems. Hybrid clouds are trending and are second on the list, while open-source cloud comes in at No. 3. These three major trends are changing how vendors and customers build cloud environments.

Cloud goes into production environments
Enterprise application architecture typically evolves from cloud 1.0 to cloud 2.0 to cloud 3.0. In the cloud 1.0 phase, virtualization technology plays the key role. Enterprises pay attention to optimizing resources and migrating non-key applications, such as office applications, to the cloud. In this phase, virtualization architecture is the best choice.

In 2.0, cloud management platform technology takes on the key role. Enterprises focus on how to efficiently and reliably support latency-sensitive services and migrate key applications, such as SAP and Oracle databases, to the cloud. During this phase, the bare metal service is one of the critical capabilities of the cloud platform.

Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) technologies characterize cloud 3.0. In this phase, enterprises pay attention to innovative applications, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), big data and video services designed for microservice and CloudNative architecture and their direct deployment on the cloud. Lightweight, distributed and agile are the core requirements for the cloud architecture in this phase.

Cloud goes hybrid
The IT architecture of cloud data centers (DCs) are moving toward a hybrid approach. A hybrid cloud will stretch the IT infrastructure you have in your private cloud into the public domain. You can take what you do in your private cloud and extend the reach into public clouds, such as Azure and Google.

You will be able to diversify your IT infrastructure and have some of your servers, applications, and load sitting in a public cloud.

Most large enterprises, which have more than 5,000 employees, have multiple DCs, with services in the process of being migrated from virtualization to private cloud. They tend to deploy most of their services on the private clouds and external services on public clouds. In the next 10 years, hybrid clouds will become their main choice.

Most businesses in the 500 to 5,000 employee range have self-built DCs, and most of their business services are in the process of being migrated from virtualization to private clouds. They tend to deploy some of their services on public clouds, but in the coming decade, some will use private, public and hybrid cloud modes.

Commercial enterprises, with less than 500 employees, seldom have self-built DCs. Most small- and medium-sized enterprises deploy their services on a public cloud and are most likely to continue to using this in the future as their main service mode.

Cloud goes open source
Open-source code, while not new, is quickly becoming a cornerstone of the cloud environment. It allows the use of free, standard application program interfaces (APIs) that are then build on to provide a flexible and cost-effective infrastructure that can scale into the future. Most businesses can't afford to scale out with Amazon and Google, not because of the technology but because of the license fees.

For example, in the earlier stages of cloud development, proprietary software such as VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V was mainstream. But today, open-source technologies are shaping the development landscape. Free, open-source virtualization hypervisors like Xen and KVM, and the emergence of open-source software such as OpenStack and CloudStack operating systems, are helping open-source software to develop rapidly. OpenStack has become the standard for cloud architecture in the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) layer, for example.

Huawei cloud
Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. has assigned 10,000 engineers in the IT sector and 6,000 engineers in the cloud computing sector to R&D, and has built delivery centers in Shenzhen, Xi'an, Beijing, Hangzhou and Chengdu in China.

What's more, we will continue to participate in OpenStack development efforts to help build an Open Cloud computing ecosystem. Over 600 Huawei developers are working to develop OpenStack Cloud computing solutions. Huawei is an OpenStack Gold Member and Gold Director for 2016.