Trends of cloud computing in 2014!

Happy new year! 2013 is a great year for cloud computing, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and a few dozen of players in the market had made tremendous amount of progress of making cloud computing more usful, more usable and more stable. Here, I predict what is going to happen for cloud computing in 2014. Cloud computing comprises three distinct segments, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.

For IaaS, there will be two areas of the innovations are arising, the first area is access control of IaaS. IaaS basically provide computing resources on demand to the customers, the billing management of the IaaS resources remains lackluster among the existing providers. Allowing flexible billing methods such as invoice and control of the billing according to organization structure are going to make the IaaS more usable to customers of various organizations. The second area of the innovation is the diversity of the VM types. Currently, most of the IaaS providers provide a few variations of CPU cores and memory size, the customer optimal virtual machine may be of a specific combination of CPU cores and memory size that are not in the pre-set, we can expect some cloud providers are going to provide more customization of the VMs, including CPU, memory and even GPU, sound card or bandwidth.

For PaaS, we are going to see improved consistency between in cloud and off cloud development experience. In the first generation of PaaS frameworks, developers write code on their own machine, and upload the code along with related resources to the cloud. "Hope" the same cloud runs on local machine will work well in the cloud. Increasingly, the discrepancy of the behavior of the code between on-premise and in cloud are driving cloud provider to provide strong in cloud debugging and tracing capabilities, the boundary between in cloud and on premise development are becoming smear over the time. 

For SaaS, in 2013, there are already very very successful SaaS providers such as Sales Force, github, these websites sell software experience to end customers via the Web. Customers no long need to purchase the software binaries to use them. We will experience continued growth of this trend, more and more enterprise software will adopt this path to grow because it simplifies the supply chain of software distribution and it makes the software itself platform agnostic. 

2014 is going to be another great year of cloud computing.