Pandemic-driven digital transformation has gained unprecedented speed. The cloud has become the pillar on which the digital world is built.
The global cloud market is on track to achieve a tenfold growth forecast by the end of the decade. Most of the cloud trends for 2022 identified by Scaleway experts focus on improving quality of life here and now, but there are also broader phenomena among them that will fundamentally change tomorrow's digital landscape.
Not only are the cloud industry's capabilities constantly growing, but so are expectations of it. The cloud must provide answers to today's technical, practical, and social challenges. In 2022, we will observe how this technology develops and is adopted at breakneck speed. When implementing new solutions, customers will increasingly pay attention to factors other than price and performance.
Here are 10 cloud trends that Scaleway believes are worth watching in 2022.
INNOVATION IN THE CLOUD
1. The importance of multi-cloud is growing
Multi-cloud, or using services from multiple cloud providers instead of relying on just one, will gain popularity in 2022. Stakeholders are becoming increasingly aware of the risks associated with putting all their eggs in one basket.
Outages at leading service providers have caused serious turbulence on the customer side, especially for those using a single provider. This was shown, among other things, by a major AWS outage that was felt worldwide. The multi-cloud trend will provide greater choice, price arbitrage, and risk management, both geopolitically and in terms of resilience. The promise of ensuring business continuity while reducing costs will cement multi-cloud's position.
2. People do not want to manage servers more than necessary
Adoption of modern cloud architecture abstractions will continue to develop rapidly on both the container side, especially Kubernetes, and the serverless side.
According to Gartner, by 2025, 85% of organizations will use containers in production, compared with about 30% in 2020. This significant increase indicates the scalability and flexibility of the architecture, which are increasingly desirable features. Reducing costs and complexity will not only enable more efficient use of resources but also accelerate actual work, because less time will need to be spent managing technology.
3. Cloud architecture is becoming increasingly modular
As technological needs and demand for new applications grow, cloud architecture will have to become increasingly modular so that product ecosystems work well together and can support applications not yet known. This is reflected in the projected tripling of the cloud microservices market between 2020 and 2026.
The agility, scalability, and performance of microservices architecture will prove too significant to ignore. We expect IDC's 2018 forecast that 90% of applications will use microservices architecture by 2022 to indeed come true this year. To build modular container or serverless architectures, additional emphasis will be placed on connective products such as messaging and queuing or observability. These will be the products that distinguish the good from the great.
4. AI will unlock its enormous new potential in medical research
AI and robotics are transforming healthcare, as well as other industries. To harness their potential, greater trust in centralized and edge cloud solutions will be essential. Using local servers for resource-intensive research is proving too expensive.
Cloud technology providers will have to meet this challenge by offering increasingly energy-efficient solutions.
5. Open source as a great equalizer
Open source software will soon be hailed as the ideal solution, ensuring equal opportunities. The developer community is increasingly moving away from IP- and patent-based products, and the barrier to market entry is significantly lower. This opens doors for individuals and organizations with fewer resources - startups, early-stage companies, nonprofits, and those from developing countries and elsewhere.
However, the question remains: who pays for high-quality open source? Who really controls it? There is no clarity on this issue.
WORK IN TECHNOLOGY
6. Developer experience will be in the spotlight
New generations of developers expect the same seamless experience they know from personal apps in the solutions used at work. When their search proves fruitless, new solutions will have to emerge. On an even broader scale, work environments will evolve to facilitate remote and asynchronous work.
7. Purpose and values first
Cloud trends 2022: from multi-cloud to green data centers
Young professionals strive to live in accordance with their values and to consume, work, and play accordingly. The ability to buy locally and use a provider that makes efforts toward sustainability will be just as important to employees as to consumers. 90% of millennials refuse to work for companies that cannot prove they operate according to sustainability principles, so in 2022 responsibility will become a business necessity.
SUSTAINABILITY AND SOVEREIGNTY
8. Data centers are feeling the pressure
The sustainability of data centers will be subject to even stricter public scrutiny than before. The fact that cloud installations consume excessive amounts of energy and water is increasingly being made public. Greater transparency and pressure from institutions and consumers will mobilize action among those who have so far avoided pursuing environmental initiatives in favor of short-term financial gains.
We will also witness a shift in conversations about IT's environmental impact toward code. Technology such as serverless will be hailed as the green choice when it comes to waste-free use of computing power, because it operates - and therefore consumes energy - only when needed, and is not always on.
9. Egress fees and cloud credits will be challenged
Egress fees - when cloud service providers charge customers for leaving their services - and cloud credits - when the same companies give businesses free access to their offerings and then apply lock-in - have recently been a major point of contention in the cloud industry.
The industry has matured to the point where turning a blind eye to the lock-in effect, that is, making customers dependent on providers, is no longer acceptable - both from a consumer protection perspective and from a legal perspective. In 2022, we will witness activity by antitrust authorities as the foundations enabling them to regulate become established.
10. The EU will shake up the conditions of competition
At a time when leading markets (such as the US and China) pursue asymmetric public procurement policies and favor local CSPs, their European counterparts are at a disadvantage. The European Union will step in to restore balance and competitiveness.
It will do so in two ways:
1) By regulating digital gatekeepers through the Digital Markets Act and the Data Act
2) By implementing a cloud computing policy based on reciprocity, equal opportunities, software sovereignty, and a new Buy European Tech Act.
This will hopefully be an incentive to adopt harmonized national cloud computing strategies.
THE COMING YEARS: TECHNOLOGY MEGATRENDS ACCORDING TO SCALEWAY
Global cloud revenue surpasses telecommunications revenue
IDC forecasts that by 2025 the public cloud segment will grow by 21%, reaching a value of $809 billion by the middle of the decade. If this growth is sustained - and we believe it will be - cloud revenue will eclipse the telecommunications industry's revenue before the end of the decade.
Adoption of Web3 and blockchain technology will accelerate
Blockchain and Web3 are being heralded as "the next era of the Internet." What it will actually look like once the first hype has passed remains to be seen. We expect, however, that thanks to Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) solutions operating in multi-cloud infrastructures, everyone will have better access to the benefits blockchain offers, without needing deep technical knowledge.
A host of new entities will appear in the metaverse
Could the time for mass adoption of VR and AR finally have arrived? Will a new frontier be crossed? The metaverse is another currently fashionable buzzword that will require significant cloud support if it is to truly develop. Meanwhile, Meta may try to present itself as a team player, especially since Mark Zuckerberg has already (reluctantly) admitted that one platform will not rule them all.
Apple will push forward with augmented reality play
By announcing new technologies at its WWDC conference - and AR-enabled glasses expected to hit the market in 2022 - Apple will drive demand for 5G and low-latency telecommunications/cloud infrastructure, thereby changing the way we look at technology.
Europe will take a stance in quantum computing
In fact, it has been doing so since 2019. Could it be too late to compete with the advances of Google and IBM? Europe's answer will come from numerous laboratories and regional startups. The race has only just begun!
Autonomous cars will still not be widespread
Sure, Tesla is making progress. But broader adoption of this technology requires not only comprehensive intra-city, intercity, interstate, and cross-border infrastructure, but also legislation. And a shift in mindset that may be harder to rebuild than putting up 5G towers.
