Many industry experts analyzed and predicted the Cloud Computing trends for 2012. Here is a list of what I think is in store for the Cloud this New Year.

SSD based Cloud Storage – I was hoping to see the Cloud storage vendors offering SSD based storage options in 2011. But, for some reason that did not happen. 2012 will see a surge in the SSD based Cloud storage offerings. This will also alleviate the concerns of running high I/O tasks on the Cloud. EBS on AWS and Azure Drive suffer from the same throughput issues. SSD will be a big boost for moving I/O intensive workloads to the Cloud.

Global Expansion of Cloud Providers – Expect to see Cloud providers adding additional geographies and locations in an attempt to get closer to the customers. Today, Singapore is the hub for many Cloud providers in Asia Pacific. In 2012, Hong Kong, Australia and China will see heavy data center investments. With traditional H/W companies like HP, Delland IBM aggressively pushing their Cloud agenda, they are likely to expand the footprint across the globe.

The Rise of OpenStack–I am betting big on OpenStack in 2012! OpenStack is quickly becoming the Linux of the Cloud world. It is being positioned as a viable alternative to AWS. Though I personally believe that OpenStack has miles to go before it can match the AWS maturity and stability, many AWS wannabes are embracing OpenStack and investing in it. This is good for fast-tracking the evolution of OpenStack. 2012 will see OpenStack powering many commercial IaaS offerings.

The Rise of Cloud Foundry–Cloud Foundry is an underdog of the PaaS world. I am fan of Cloud Foundry because of its design and architecture. The folks at VMware designed it as an extremely generic, platform agnostic PaaS engine. And, it is open source! Cloud Foundry enables any platform / framework vendor to implement their PaaS through Cloud Foundry. ActiveState’s Python PaaS, Stackato is an example of what a framework leader can do with Cloud Foundry. Don’t forget that Cloud Foundry also powers the very first .NET PaaS alternative to Windows Azure. The Private PaaS paradigm will be completely driven through Cloud Foundry.

Every PaaS will become Polyglot – Almost every PaaS vendor wants us to believe that they can speak multiple languages. Heroku, Cloud Foundry, Windows Azure and OpenShift – all the platforms support a variety of languages. Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, Node.js and C# are the usual suspects. And then each vendor supports additional services like RabbitMQ, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL and Memcached. More languages and services will be added to the popular stacks of PaaS.It is interesting to see which language / platform / framework dominates the PaaS world in 2012.

DevOps will be a mainstream Job function –Expect to see job postings with the new description of DevOps. With the line between IaaS and PaaS blurring, DevOps professionals will be in demand. Developers will be part administrators and IT admins will be part developers. This trend will be fueled by some of the shifts in the service models. For example, AWS will add more languages to Beanstalk to project AWS as a PaaS for developers. Windows Azure will expose APIs for every administrative task and also invests more in VM Role to move towards the IaaS layer. Adoption of Puppet, Chef and CloudFormation will create additional DevOps jobs in 2012.

Cloud Monitoring Tools–We will see many startups and existing players offering Multi-Cloud / Multi-Resourcemonitoring, tracking and management services. This will go beyond AWS CloudWatch and Windows Azure Diagnostics offeringlightweight, rich visualizations on the Cloud analytics. This will also include tracking the billing and usage of Cloud resources. Expect to see the clones of Cloudability.com in 2012 with additional capabilities.

Consolidation of NoSQL players– The NoSQL market is heavily fragmented with more than a dozen vendors offering some flavor of NoSQL databases. In 2012, this segment will see a consolidation and only a few NoSQL vendors will survive at the end. With traditional RDBMS vendors like Oracle, Microsoft and IBM officially entering this space, it will be interesting to see who will remain and who will get crushed!

Big Data will Grow Big–In 2011, Big Data and Hadoop finally came out of the closet into the mainstream. It is no more an academic research project with just a few open source prototypes. Cloudera, Yahoo! Hortonworks, MapR, DataStax and Hadapt are betting their business on Big Data. Microsoft’s partnership with Hortonworks endorsed this phenomenon in a big way! It’s a healthy sign to see these companies building commercial business models around Big Data. Also, expect to see more managed Hadoop and Map Reduce frameworks on the Cloud in 2012.

Do you think I missed something? What are your predictions for the Cloud in 2012?

-Janakiram MSV, Cloud Specialist, GetCloudReady.com

Platform wars are not new to us. I have personally survived a few in the last two decades and I think I am all set to witness the biggest platform battle in the next couple of years. But this time the battleground is different. It has moved from the desktops to the servers to the web and now to the Clouds.

In the mid 90s, the platform war was fought to gain supremacy in the client-server environments. While mainframes and mid-ranges reined the enterprise computing, the departmental applications started to surface within the enterprises. The contenders back then were Oracle with their Oracle 7 and Developer 2000 combination, Microsoft with SQL Server 6.5 / Visual Basic 6.0 and then we had other potential players like PowerBuilder with Sybase and Borland with Delphi. But towards the end of the 90s, Visual Basic emerged as the winner. It has democratized application development and enabled developers with moderate programming skills to develop robust applications. Irrespective of the database backend, VB6 got the thumbs up for being the most powerful Rapid Application Development (RAD) tool and unarguably, VB6 was a platform than just a language!

Then during the late 90s, the battlefield was the mission critical enterprise application space and the fight was to win the distributed computing battle. By then, PowerBuilder and Delphi went out of the game and Java Enterprise Edition (J2EE) took Microsoft’s Windows Distributed iNternet Architecture (DNA) head on. Microsoft heavily pitched the combination of VB, COM+ and SQL Server while J2EE was backed by Sun, IBM, Oracle and BEA in the form of iPlanet, IBM WebSphere, Oracle AppServer, BEA WebLogic and of course Oracle as the preferred database. This was almost a tie as this wave lived a very short life before quickly transitioning to the WWW.

In 2000, Microsoft announced .NET with an ambitious plan of winning the WWW. By then J2EE has matured and had gone beyond the control of Sun. So the war was primarily between .NET and Java. Microsoft’s investment in .NET in the form of Visual Studio, Web Services and ASP.NET fueled the adoption across its customer base. J2EE rapidly evolved to match .NET and very soon it became evident that it is either .NET or Java. And then came the next big wave in the form of consumer web applications and the Web 2.0 phenomenon. Both .NET and Java looked heavy and bloated to build the new breed of lightweight and cool web applications that could run on inexpensive hardware and open source software. This is where we saw the swing of the pendulum towards the Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) platform. Along with that came the surge in adoption of dynamic languages like Python, Ruby and various associated frameworks. Fast-forwarding to 2011, today the platforms are essentially .NET, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby and JavaScript. Developers want a flexible yet powerful platform to deploy their applications.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is the future of the Cloud! Just in 2011, we saw many acquisitions and announcements including Heroku by SalesForce.com and CloudFoundry by VMware. My understanding is that the PaaS space will be broadly divided among the .NET, Java and LAMP platforms. While we are yet to see a serious competition to Microsoft Windows Azure in the form of a .NET based PaaS, there is a huge competition among the Java PaaS players including Google App Engine, VMware CloudFoundry, RedHat OpenShift and Heorku. Amazon is also vying for this space through its Elastic Beanstalk offering. Recently at Oracle OpenWorld 2011, Oracle has announced its Java PaaS. So, Java developers have a wide range of PaaS offerings to choose from! Interestingly, the same set of players is adding support for PHP, Python, Ruby and Node.js. For example, Heroku has added support for Ruby, Node.js, Clojure, Python and Scala. Same is the case with CloudFoundry which claims that it can run PHP (through AppFog), Ruby, Node.js and Scala! Even Microsoft wants the developers to believe that they can run their Java and PHP applications on Windows Azure.

So, while the platform decision is still divided among the traditional offerings of .NET, Java and LAMP, the deployment choice is overwhelming. This is just the beginning and we have interesting times ahead in the PaaS world!

I am writing this post almost after a year since my last blog post. The last couple of years (2010 and 2011) have been phenomenal for me. Especially, the last 12 months of being an Evangelist with Amazon Web Services gave me tremendous opportunity to engage with customers, partners and the community in India. I was privileged to join AWS as the first employee in India. After spending a year at AWS, I have decided to become an entrepreneur and thus evolves Janakiram 2.0!

Cloud Computing brought a huge transformation to my professional life. Having worked on COM, DCOM, MTS, COM+, Web Services, WCF and SOA, Cloud was a natural progression for me. But it is certainly more than that. The day I got exposed to Windows Azure (this was back in 2008), I had a strong inclination to learning more and going deep into the concepts. That led me to explore other stacks like Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine. Understanding the common concepts across IaaS and PaaS stacks made me realize the potential that this paradigm holds for the businesses. I started dreaming of being an independent, unbiased and neutral Cloud Computing expert. I wanted to help the consumers of the Cloud choose the right platform and also optimize their applications and work loads to take advantage of the chosen platform. While I was nurturing this dream, I got an opportunity to be a Technical Architect for Cloud at Microsoft and then as the Technology Evangelist at Amazon Web Services. After a lot of planning and thought, I decided that this is the right time for me to realize my dream and get started as an independent Cloud Specialist.

I play three different roles in my new Avatar. First, I am going to be a ‘Product Manager on Demand’ for product companies helping them all the way from the specifications to Go-To-Market strategy. I am fortunate to have a couple of customers who trust me for their product strategy. I deliver this as the Principal Consultant of Janakiram & Associates. Secondly, I play the role of the Cloud Specialist at GetCloudReady.com. GetCloudReady.com is an initiative of Janakiram & Associates to enable individuals and businesses to be Cloud ready. I offer training as a part of ‘Get Cloud Ready for Teams’ program and consulting as a part of ‘Get Cloud Ready for Applications’ program. I am very excited to offer niche, value-driven training on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Windows Azure. The third role that I play is going to be as the Chief Editor of a Cloud portal. I am partnering with the passionate team at YourStory.in to launch India’s first dedicated online property for Cloud that aspires to be India’s most credible voice in the world of Cloud Computing offering insights, news, analysis and reviews.

As an independent, unbiased and neutral Cloud Computing advocate, I promise to deliver value to my customers, partners and community through my online and offline engagements. I am going to invest in valuable content that will be available through my blog and various other channels. So, stay tuned and I look forward to your feedback!

I want to thank my friends, mentors and advisors who instilled the confidence in me to take the plunge. I am indebted to them for spending numerous hours with me, patiently listening to my plans, and offering their valuable insights. I will strive to live up to the expectations!

Wish you a Very Happy New Year 2012!