What does the future hold for cloud computing in 2013? (page 3 of 3)

That community is a big part of the reason that Red Hat joined the OpenStack Foundation, of which it's a Platinum Member.

We believe that 2013 is going to see all that developer involvement lead to commercial product in the same way that the open source development model has led to innovative products in operating systems, middleware and countless other areas. The details of how OpenStack is developed and governed have their unique nuances—as is the case with pretty much every major open source project—but ultimately the breadth and depth of community has to be counted as a huge strength.

Private (and hybrid) Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) goes mainstream

Like other aspects of cloud computing, PaaS has evolved in response to the market. The basic idea of PaaS—that many application developers don't want to be exposed to and have to deal with the underlying operating system and associated plumbing—remains in place. However, PaaS platforms that limit developers to a specific language on a specific hosting platform have only seen lukewarm acceptance. And it's telling that a number of language- and framework-specific PaaSes have shifted toward a more polyglot (multiple languages/frameworks) strategy.

However, for many organisations, moving all of their development into a public cloud is too big a step even if they can choose their tools.

Alternatively, they may simply not want to give up some of the features, such as auto-scaling and application multi-tenancy, that a PaaS can provide once they move an application into production on-premise. The management tools a PaaS like Red Hat's OpenShift offers to system admins can help address these issues and demonstrate that a PaaS needn't be just a tool for developers.

Thus, as has been the case with IaaS, we expect that PaaS is going to increasingly be seen not just as a public cloud capability, but as a private and hybrid one. Perhaps even primarily as private and hybrid, at least as far as enterprise application development is concerned. There are already some early examples of private PaaS in the market but we predict that the trend is going to really accelerate in 2013.