2011 has been another amazing year for all things cloud – it’s now time to start thinking about 2012 and how the cloud will evolve over the next 12 months. Prognostication can be unpredictable, because of the rapidly evolving world we live in. When I made predictions in 2010 50 percent of them happened and I think that is about the success rate we should hope for on these. Here it goes…
1. Complex hosting morphs into Platform-as-a-Service (PAAS). We are already starting to see this trend with the ASP.Net Cloud Sites product we offer at Cbeyond Cloud Services. Technologically advanced companies are looking to simplify their environments and one of the easiest things they can do is leverage the PAAS to do it.
2. Specialization of cloud providers is going to become more important. Instead of selecting a generalist provider and having them host all their applications, customers will be more inclined to select best-of-breed providers (like Engine Yard or Heroku for Ruby on Rails or CFDynamics for Cold Fusion). This trend is being accelerated by a number of providers starting to offer cloud syndication along with the new class of cloud management tools like RightScale and Abiquo.