Embotics Cloud Management Blog

With the explosive growth of the cloud, big data analytics and SaaS-based business applications and services, we’ve seen the underlying application architecture transform. Applications today are no longer limited by the infrastructure they run on. Instead, they can control their fundamental infrastructure technologies, turning them into services to be harnessed on demand and programmatically during application execution. Key to exploiting “Infrastructure as Code”, modern applications are being constructed out of a collection of autonomous, independent building blocks dedicated to a single function each, called Microservices. Uber, Amazon, Netflix, Ebay and Twitter have all publicly embraced this type of approach to building and delivering their services. So why are so many organizations turning to microservices in the cloud era?

Earlier this month, a group of us took a trip out West to Las Vegas for the Amazon re:Invent conference – one of the biggest cloud shows of the year. We go to this show every year, and I continue to be impressed by a number of things – not only the growth of the show itself or the breadth and depth of services offered by Amazon Web Services (more than 32,000 attendees and 1,000 PaaS services this year!), but by the philosophy and vision that’s made clear throughout the event.

As end users rely more and more on computing resources and services to get their jobs done, IT organizations — and system administrators in particular — are experiencing ever-increasing demands on their time. Despite the importance of IT in strategic and tactical operations, many IT departments are so overrun with requests that doing things in a reactive and ad hoc fashion becomes the norm.

The cloud services market is at a crossroads. After a period of extensive and explosive growth in cloud services, the stakes are high. The past decade has been a good one for the cloud services market, but one of the things I hear more frequently than ever before from those in the industry is that, over the next year or two, we may be looking at a big change. A lot of very smart people believe that those in this space are going to have to make some bets, and are going to have to provide service at a whole new level. When cloud services are normalized on the way to commoditization, that’s what it takes for organizations to continue to grow. Some companies will thrive, and some will not.