The Cloudcast

The Cloudcast #300 - The Good, the Bad and the Boring

June 09, 2017 Aaron Delp and Brian Gracely
The Cloudcast
The Cloudcast #300 - The Good, the Bad and the Boring
Show Notes
Aaron and Brian talk about the evolution of Cloud Computing over that past 6+ years - The pace of change, the impact of open source and foundations, the critical elements of public cloud, and what has been a surprise.

Show Links:
Show Notes:

Topic 1 - We’re done nearly 7 days of shows (~160hrs), had 30 companies acquired, and over 3M+ listens. Thank you to everyone that listens and tells a friend. Rate the show on iTunes!

Topic 2 - Looking back at the last 6+ years, what has surprised you the most or been the most expected? Pace of change? Rise of public cloud?
  • 2011 - AWS at ~$250M/qtr; 2017 - AWS at $3.66B/qtr
  • The Clouderati crowd
  • OpenStack / Foundations
  • Lack of Mega Mergers (“EMC Federation” model?)
  • No one really talks IaaS, Paas, SaaS anymore
  • All the $1 Billion investments in cloud…
  • AWS grew to support Amazon, Google Cloud is spin off and not core to growth
  • Kubernetes as the “final architecture” / or is it serverless...
Topic 3 - Follow the money - How has VC funding been tracking? What about exits?
  • VC investments in infrastructure have become rare, markets have moved on
  • Lots of money went into big data; now going into AI. Is it paying off?
Topic 4 - We’ve both now worked in open source. What impact have you seen this have on the tech industry? Interesting chart from Joseph Jacks about OSS-centric startups 
  • Big customers get invested and are vocal about it 
  • Small customers just want stuff to work and don’t want to hire experts 
  • Is public cloud the monetization model for OSS?
    Topic 5 - The divide between those on the cloud bandwagon (e.g. meetups, AWS/Serverless/CNCF events) and those not (e.g. Interop) seems to be growing. The revenues don’t exactly track this, but how do you see the next 3-5 years of the industry playing out for people in the industry?
    • Infrastructure vendors will be squeezed and consolidated
    • Public Cloud will give way to the next “Big 3-4”. It was IBM, Cisco, HP, Dell, etc. Now it is AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and SaaS based offerings
      Topic 6- Where are we thinking about going with the show? AI, Business-Centric SaaS Apps, Multi-Cloud realities (or horrors)
        Topic 7- Let’s end on something boring. There has been some talk about the need to make some element of technology boring (e.g. infrastructure). Do you think that’s possible in the competitive technology markets? We’ve seen on smartphones, virtualization, etc.
        Feedback?