What does it mean to have a new cloud explosion?

Last week, industry giants such as Cisco, Google, Amazon and Microsoft issued major announcements about cloud services, detonating a new wave of unprecedented clouds.

Cisco first announced that it would invest $1 billion in OpenStack-based "interconnected Cloud" (Intercloud) to boost its ability to deliver cloud services to large, business-to-business customers. One day later, Google announced a 32% reduction in the price of its cloud computing engine (Compute Engine), a 30% reduction in the price of its application engine (app Engine), a 68% reduction in the price of cloud storage (Cloud Storage) and a 85% reduction in bigquery prices, A program called "Sustainable use discounts" was also introduced to further reduce prices. 24 hours later, Amazon also announced a reduction in the price of its simple storage service (Storage) 36-65%, a series of price cuts such as the 30–40% of the Flexible Computing Cloud (EC2).

Satya Nadella, Microsoft's chief executive, dropped a bombshell at a press conference in Thursday announcing the launch of an ipad version of office and a cloud idea that anyone and any device could use. Nadella explicitly says Microsoft wants to control the saas[market in cloud computing. Microsoft wants to start with a client that uses Office 365 to achieve the goal of catching up with a new wave of equipment revolutions in the future.

How should we interpret this new round of cloud explosions?

1, quickly to iaas[note] Market March

While no one can know exactly what Cisco is thinking about OpenStack interconnected cloud, providing professional infrastructure services to the telecoms industry is a very interesting idea. If sdn[means that the good days of high-end, high-margin networking devices are numbered, the best option for Cisco is to turn to high-end, high-margin cloud services.

As for Google and Amazon, the price of their iaas has been slashed sharply because they may not be sure whether the company will relocate a large number of existing infrastructure to the cloud. Large companies cannot tolerate any degree of dependency, and migrating to Google or Amazon's cloud computing does not exempt customers from managing infrastructure, even if they are virtual. On the other hand, price cuts only accelerate the activity of ordinary enterprise IaaS. For example, research and development and testing, disaster recovery, and the IaaS as a platform to create customer-facing business systems that can quickly adjust and expand.

Yet for start-ups, they are a different idea. Who wants to invest rich money in infrastructure? The low price of cloud power attracts these companies to put everything on the cloud, while the "continue to use discounts" scheme makes it virtually impossible for these new companies to relocate their cloud deployments to their local infrastructure. It is not expected to be long before Google's rivals take the same price cuts.

2, on the cloud for application development

The most interesting part is that Google's price-cutting measures also involve its PAAs (Platform-service) application engine. Currently, a PAAs with a similar app engine is being used by most independent software developers to create, test, and deploy Web and mobile applications. The problem with public cloud PAAs is that users are limited in services such as language and databases, which is why many developers choose the cloud based on IaaS (infrastructure, service [note]). On the latter, the user can select the virtual machine they like to create the stack.

In this respect, Google's new virtual management Machine (VMM) introduced a hybrid solution. Not only can users create, deploy, and manage the kernel of their applications or services on the app engine, they can also manage VMM that contains applications or service components deployed on compute engine. In addition, Google has announced the integration of Git and GitHub in this scenario, which makes many app engine developers feel very happy.

Now PAAs has become the hottest cloud computing area. Companies are also actively exploring public cloud PAAs to create new customer-facing applications, while many companies are looking at local PAAs. Within the Enterprise data center, PAAs is ready to replace the application server, which not only has an extensible architecture but also can support multiple languages.

3. SaaS is redefined

Technically, SaaS is defined as multi-tenant software that is maintained by a provider through browser-based clients such as Salesforce or Google apps. But the user experience needs to be in the first place. For example, the ipad version of Office's user experience is far better than the user experience of using Office Web apps on the ipad.

If Microsoft has really changed their strategy and plans to support all platforms equally, rather than leaving windows with the best user experience, then Office 365 and Azure will be the SaaS-driven coach. SaaS may no longer be defined as the cloud distribution center for ordering software, as well as Exchange, OneDrive file storage, Azure Active directory for user identification, and much more will remain on Microsoft cloud services.

Eventually, we will see Microsoft expand its enterprise application product line with the Microsoft Dynamics CRM model. This will give birth to a new software model that consists of local clients that provide the required user experience, JavaScript that does not require user experience, and back-end functionality located on the cloud.

It should be clear that what happened last week does not mean that we are taking a step toward the goal of moving everything to the cloud. They are only a clear indication of the trends in things, and those that should appear are becoming clearer.