What Is Stopping Cloud Computing From Becoming A Business Utility?

Organizations in every industry have started to realize the potential of cloud computing, yet the thought of treating the cloud as a utility is a debatable topic for industry experts. According to them, what is lacking is a greater sense of standardization across the cloud industry. If you consider other utilities like internet, power, and mobile network service providers, you have the option to switch providers and compare them on the basis of cost and service. But switching between cloud providers and comparing their services is still a distant reality.

Theoretically, cloud tools have a clean slate to compare their performance, cost, and have the option of easily moving workload to another tool as required. But practically, this is still a challenge.

What's The Challenge?

Although the majority of the cloud providers deliver the same product, there are key differences in each product. For example, each delivers a different interface and method of communicating with the program. While moving workloads, the problem arises due to the varying APIs of each provider. This makes it complicated and difficult to attain a utility-like status.

When compared to another utility like electricity, the process of change is an administrative act. One has to fill a couple of forms and the switch will noticeably take place without any power shortage. This seamless change has become an essential method for many people to find the best deals and providers.

Talking about the cloud, its orchestration makes switching cloud providers just as easy as switching electricity suppliers. The cloud orchestration (CO) platform acts as an interpreter between the infrastructure and a particular cloud. Within the cloud orchestration, there is an abstraction layer that communicates with the infrastructure. A tool in the cloud makes sure that the communication is translated into the language of the said cloud provider.

Another challenge that practically comes in the way is the fact that cloud providers launch several new services every year while third-party cloud orchestration platforms allow organizations to develop in-house solutions. This makes management and maintenance more challenging.

Companies are also facing cloud migration because of hyper-scalers offering virtualization platforms in their clouds. Many organizations only run a specific application in the cloud and not the whole virtualization program. Although this approach simplifies the migration, it doesn't help an organization to compare it with a public cloud which results in deeper vendor lock-in.

On a positive note, this approach offers the advantage of working within an ecosystem that has been developed for AWS native virtualization, making a company's migration from on-premises to cloud and vice versa or from cloud to cloud, an extremely challenging process.

The Solution

To make things easier, a greater degree of IT orchestration is needed that can deliver smoother migration processes. In addition to cloud orchestration platforms, there are other options too that can increase the speed of change of workloads between clouds. For example, independent containers can play a role as the dependency of the software resides in the container. This will facilitate smooth migration as differences in the infrastructure level will not cause problems.