Will Artificial Intelligence impact the cloud?

A candidate asked me this question yesterday. “How do you see artificial intelligence impacting Cloud Academy?“. The short answer is that I don’t have a precise answer but I think businesses like Cloud Academy will define a new category in the enterprise business software. Let me explain why.

AI is already impacting cloud and infrastructure management, and that will grow in the next 2-5 years: most of that is already happening for AWS or Microsoft Azure within their managed services (think Amazon RDS), but I expect that to be the norm for every type of infrastructure, private or public.

But Cloud is much more than infrastructure today, cloud computing is how companies build and operate their software and services. If you are a junior developer today you will likely start building your application using something like AWS, Google Cloud, Azure or Salesforce and your application will be deployed on these ecosystems. Today, the common enterprise cloud stack is already quite complex and it goes from infrastructure to SaaS, with several layers that need to communicate to each other and need to talk to your legacy systems. Keep in mind are still living in a world where a bit more than 10% of software is SaaS, there is still a lot of legacy stuff running in private data centers ready for disruption. So what’s AI role? It will likely help companies to automate more and more in their infrastructure and we will see several titles disappear forever, think of database administrators, sysadmins and storage administrators  but ultimately enterprise companies in every industry will keep hiring more and more software engineers as the real challenge will increasingly be about creating competitive digital solutions for your own business, building on top of hundreds of frameworks and vendors that are providing resources and APIs to do it. 

In this context, companies will have to not only invest billions in developing and updating tech skills for their teams, but they will also need to have a platform that allows them to collect data, insights and understand skill trends in their IT organizations. That’s why we keep building Cloud Academy focusing on technology first, our final goal is giving enterprise companies an Operating System to manage technology skills, at scale. 

LinkedIn has a nice report on how AI is impacting the job market and which positions are getting hurt by artificial intelligence. Nice read. Stay tuned….at Cloud Academy we are close to releasing a nice set of tools to understand a bit more how the cloud computing jobs market is changing 🙂

Multi-cloud and SaaS are eating the world

If there’s one thing that I know for sure, it’s that change, especially in IT, is the only constant.

Storm

Photo by Dylan Lee (https://www.flickr.com/photos/canon_dlee/40565384360/)

Eleven years ago, I was working in the web hosting industry. At the time, I was invited to visit a customer who owned some of the best and biggest Tier 4 data centers in Germany. These facilities were mostly operated by banks and large brands like Equinix, Global Crossing, and others, and they had thousands of racks, servers, and cables.

This customer was one of many companies who leased data center space and resold web hosting services like dedicated servers or Virtual Private Servers (VPS). These guys were particularly smart and spent a lot of time trying to automate their services so that their customers could monitor the infrastructure and take control if needed. Most of that software was written in Perl (I actually remember a big book about Perl on their desk!) and it was absolutely scrappy, a few charts, some commands to reboot servers, and so on.

I was curious. Instead of reselling hardware and space, why didn’t they focus on software? Continue reading “Multi-cloud and SaaS are eating the world”