Cloud Computing: Why The Middle Tier, Including Docker, Won’t Matter to Most of Us
Grazed from TheNewStack. Author: Joe Emison.
The rise of cloud computing (read: VMs, containers, bare metal by API) is of enormous benefit to businesses everywhere: we can now deliver products faster and better using fewer workers than ever before. And we are seeing a concordant interest in technologies that improve on the first iterations of cloud computing, from monitoring tools to containers and Docker. But the knee-jerk focus on improved versions of cloud computing ignores the fact that cloud computing is in the process of being disrupted by cloud-based services in a way that will ultimately render these improvements irrelevant to most organizations and developers.
The middle tier is being abstracted by cloud services. The developer doesn’t have to deal with all the complexities that have historically come with managing apps. It is the service provider, not the user, that manages the application servers, containers, monitoring and everything else. A user developing a thick AngularJS web app just makes a call to the service…


Every major IT vendor wants to convince data center administrators that their infrastructure isn’t up-to-date without cloud. But do you really need cloud to be considered modern? And what kind of cloud? Cloud computing offers a maximum amount of versatility on servers. Deploying a server in a cloud environment is easy because it is automated. System administrators are no longer needed for the install. Instead, the user can automatically deploy one within minutes.