Is the road to success in the cloud horizontal or vertical? I’m not talking about actual roads, of course, but rather about whether pursuit of public cloud revenue should be directed at generally useful technologies (horizontal) or specialized and focused applications (vertical). One of these approaches has dominated over time, but the other is seeing increased interest and one provider is arguably betting it’s going to be the best approach.
When public cloud computing first launched, it tended to be as generally targeted as possible, looking for simple server consolidation as the driver. IaaS, or infrastructure as a service, tries to make the cloud look and work like a server, which is obviously pretty “horizontal” in my terms. However, it became clear to providers eventually that less than a quarter of business IT could migrate to the cloud under the IaaS paradigm.
“Web services”, meaning features offered through APIs by cloud providers to facilitate developing or modifying apps to maximize cloud benefit, were the answer to this. At this point, we saw our first signs of a different approach among providers. Amazon stayed very generic in its tools, while Microsoft with Azure specialized their cloud services to mesh with Windows Server, creating a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) model distributable between premises and cloud.
Web services’ tendency to divide providers by approach is continuing and evolving, driven by provider desires to improve market share. Amazon has tended to be a bit more focused on what could be called the cloud-specific market opportunities, and Microsoft on the hybrid cloud users. These have both a horizontal and vertical dimension.
The horizontal side of the picture is the general goal of using web services to support new development framed around the separation of business applications into a distinct front-end presentation-and-device model, and back-end transaction processing model. Businesses are very reluctant to shift the latter to the cloud for a variety of reasons already well-known. On the other hand, the cloud is a way of extending web-server involvement in user interfacing. Add logic that’s still presentation-centric to the web/cloud side and you get little pushback.
The specific transitional concept, the thing that has perhaps both vertical and horizontal aspects, is mobility. Mobile apps, to optimize productivity or other value to the business, need to be more than just a web interface for a small screen. They have to reflect the difference in how a mobile user relates to information, which means that you may want to pull a bit of the back-end transaction process forward into the cloud. Conceptually, you may also want to do that for hybrid cloud applications as a means of offloading transaction processing tasks to a more elastic resource. With mobile you have vertical and horizontal drivers.
The impact of this transitional stuff happens at the point of the transition, which is the boundary between the front-end and transactional pieces of the app. That boundary is Microsoft’s specific focus and strength, and Amazon’s Greengrass and Snowball are aimed (in different ways) of supporting the migration across that boundary, either persistently because of a function shift strategy or by scaling and redeployment.
Event processing is a further evolution toward a vertical mission. Front-end and mobile apps are naturally contextual, meaning that while there may be processing steps from the initiation of an interaction to its completion, the user at least is aware of the progression and it’s therefore fairly easy to make the rest of the process as aware (as “stateful”) as it needs to be. With events, the problem is that there is not likely to be this natural context, unless the event is “atomic” meaning that it carries a complete meaning and thus a complete requirement for processing. For everything else, events need to be turned into transactions before they can be handed off. That function doesn’t exist today, and so it is as easily written for the cloud as for the data center. Great target, if you’re a cloud provider looking for some new revenue opportunity!
This is where our absent-so-far player Google comes into the picture. Google has, in my view, the best architecture from which public cloud services can be delivered. It’s not even close. However, they have tended to be more evangelists for a different way of thinking about and implementing applications than a promoter of the cloud as a business asset. As a result, they’ve neither captured the new cloud development opportunity with things like social-media startups that has fueled Amazon, nor the hybrid cloud that Microsoft has ridden to success. To try to follow either course today would set them on a catch-up path that has little glamor or chance of success. Instead they chart a new one.
Google, I think, sees two near-future drivers for the cloud. One is events, and the other artificial intelligence (AI). Google seems to see that there’s a natural symbiosis between the two, and that they could leverage that to make cloud prospects value a dualistic approach. That might then be able to migrate “down” into the mobile front-end mission, which could then give Google a shot at an equal footing with competitors.
The symbiosis between AI and events is related to a post from CPLANE, one I reposted on LinkedIn. What I get from the post is that our dependence on technology is far outstripping our tech literacy. As a result, we risk having more and more new and useful things end up going nowhere because nobody understands how to get them, deploy them, or use them. Event processing is an example of this. We organize work into transactions because we think contextually, transactionally. However, too many events with too much contextualization required overloads human ability to contextualize. AI can both handle events (which reduces the stuff that humans need to look at) and contextualize what it doesn’t handle (through complex event processing for example).
The result of this combination could focus Google on event processing rather than hosting event processing components. Amazon and Microsoft are more in the latter area. This is why I think Google focused their custom silicon (announced at their Cloud Next event) on AI instead of just looking at replicating Greengrass capabilities for migrating cloud processes to the edge by loading them on CPE.
This is one of those moves by a company that could prove very smart or very destructive. Amazon and Microsoft have won so far by appealing to the need of the moment, staying just a little out in front of merchandisable trends. That lowers both the barrier to delivering something and the barrier to using it. Google, as it traditionally has, seems to be taking the “make them rethink this” approach, which of course relies on thinking and on a more architected solution model.
Is this going to work for Google, lead the company back to at least parity with its cloud competitors? I’d like to think it will, but I have to doubt it. There has always been a cultural void between the Silicon Valley crowd and traditional businesses. I remember watching an old commercial for the Apple Lisa (well, I said it was old, didn’t I?) where a youthful guy comes into his office on the weekend with his Irish Setter and sits down to a Lisa. I happened to be with a VP at Chase the following day, and his comment on the commercial was “What kind of company would let someone bring their dog to work?” That thought probably never occurred to Apple, but the Lisa failed so maybe it should have. You can’t have instant gratification from culture revolutions; too much inertia. That’s probably true here too.