The future of cloud apps: Key trends lead the way to real benefits

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Tom Nolle.

Revolution is a big word, and one that’s overused much of the time. In the case of cloud computing, the revolutionary potential seems bogged down in pedestrian early applications. Many enterprises report that the majority of their cloud applications have been simple extensions to Web hosting or server consolidation. But for the cloud to reach its potential, it has to be more than that. Fortunately, a few trends are driving the cloud to the right place at last. These trends — which represent the future of cloud apps — include platform services, cloud-centric operations and support, and cloud-ready software and data models.

Platform services: An ‘in-between model’

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) alone is simply hosted virtualization. It will be valuable to users with low utilization and high cost of labor for hardware support, but it doesn’t offer enterprises enough economy-of-scale benefits relative to their own data centers to spawn a real revolution. Platform as a Service (PaaS), which locks users into a specific operating system and middleware set, displaces more current cost but has a narrow target of opportunity. Led by Amazon, the cloud industry is creating an in-between model: platform services…

A platform service is a service that is made available through an application program interface (API) to any application running in the cloud. The idea is to take a generally valuable application service feature (such as content caching or database management) and make it a service of the cloud rather than a component of an application that’s moved to the cloud. That lets the cloud provider optimize the platform service for cloud operation and get the maximum economy of scale, and as a result, provide the lowest cost to users. For users, in turn, it simplifies application development and lowers development cost by creating a packaged feature they can build into new development quickly…

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