Rackspace: Cloud computing tends to automate the cloud

Cloud computing has been evolving, with new demands for IT job skills evolving, such as platform upgrade capabilities, cloud automation and portability, and cloud-centric tools. Rackspace will deliver the content to users after 2013, while its chief technology officer, John Engates, said he also provided some details on cloud trends and what we can expect from cloud hosting providers in the coming year.

Reporter: How Cloud Computing Will Change Their Lives for General IT Staff in 2013?

John Engates: The set of tools in the IT department is beginning to change.

In the past, if you think about most people in the IT department, who are sysadmins and an application expert, who have hands-on architectural skills, the company will start to become more developer-oriented.

DevOps is a trend that more CIOs and businesses have accepted; you need some developer skills in order to access the cloud. You can speed up a server to a portal, but it does not take advantage of the full power of automation and the cloud, in order to be able to do so you need to be able to consume an API. We saw this trend in our own company, and at that moment I think the trend would be good to enter the business.

This also means that you are seeing more work as a general-purpose technician; as the system goes to the cloud, you may no longer need a specific database of experts or application-specific experts. You may be able to click from your cloud provider.

Reporter: We will see the infrastructure as a service to a more platform-as-a-service as part of these skills?

John Engates: Making it clear that the difference between the two is getting harder and harder.

Rackspace cloud has a product called Cloud Files, is an object storage. It looks more like a platform than infrastructure because of its features, because customers of this product have no idea how many servers we have, they do not see any machines, they do not save capacity, put their own files in and retrieve themselves document.

Some of the new features, such as big data, will be more platform-as-a-service rather than infrastructure-as-a-service. Because developers of these services to consumers. There is a concept that infrastructure-as-a-service is for system administrators and platform-as-a-service for developers.

Developers consume all of these things, and DevOps blurs the lines within your organization, so you can expect cloud providers to blur the line between product sets. I do not think people want to use them alone.

Reporter: Will there be more automation in the infrastructure as a service area in 2013? Fewer acceleration of individual instances, more distribution of workload, and proper service response?

John Engates: Another product we release in the process is a tool that allows clients to program what you describe. Instead of manually accelerating a specific instance, let the cloud do it for me. We call it Service Registry. It gives developers a place to describe applications and services that are trusted to drive some automation.

Many of our customers use Chef, but Chef essentially does not scale or scale automatically as the server grows and shrinks. Need to pass the other amount of drive, our Service Registry has become the tool.

These are going to the cloud to ensure that you do not have to consider an application in a non-federated server-to-server way, you can think of the application as a service building block.

Reporter: How is the portability between the clouds? How do you think about the portability in 2013?

John Engates: I think it will be better.

I reviewed my 2012 forecast and one of the things I mentioned is that the upcoming open-source cloud and open standards will become more and more important. This year we see this trend, but open source is still hard to understand in the cloud. Mainly because Amazon is the largest cloud vendor, they have not embraced the standard time. They allow people to leverage their APIs and build in their own products, but they have no official telling the world that they allow their standards to be open standards. This is also open to jump in to fill the gap. We expect 2013 will bring more cloud providers to adopt OpenStack.