2012 Prediction: Nimbula

At this time last year I argued that we are seeing significant disruption in the way that computing is being performed in the data center, with a number of factors leading us towards a world where compute infrastructure is delivered as a service, either by external parties - the public cloud, or by internal IT – the private cloud.

Over the last year we have seen increased adoption of this approach, with a start being made in the accompanying refresh of applications.

Over the next year, I believe the pace of this change will accelerate, and we will also see the start of more widespread adoption of two approaches that further unlock value in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds: Platform as a Service (PaaS) and DevOps.

PaaS provides environments for software development in the cloud that promised to unlock very large productivity gains. Furthermore, as these approaches get integrated with agility at lower levels of the stack – at a Virtual Machine level – we will see the deployment of application stacks that are in part comprised of PaaS applications and partly as virtual machines – tying together the automation of what was previously applications and hardware management.

Management of these applications stacks will increasingly be done by the line of business owners, allowing deployment to integrate the development of applications, and their operations – so-called DevOps, providing a huge increase in productivity and uptime.

All of these are large shifts, and will by no means be completed in the next year, but I believe 2012 will see a shift PaaS and DevOps to the mainstream.