A bit over three years ago I worked for a company that produced the most popular cloud operating system. In 2020 I hope we do no longer need cloud operating systems.
What is wrong with Cloud Operating Systems?
Technically nothing but if you do not have to worry about a cloud operating system, your life becomes so much easier. Google kicked off a “Kubernetes Revolution” in which everybody was invited to run software in mini containers in the same way Google runs their software. What nobody told the enterprises is that running a distributed Kubernetes cluster is hard work and needs lots of expensive experts. Even maintaining secure Docker images is very labour intensive and costly.
For the last two years we have been running serverless solutions in production and realistically you save a lot of money and headaches. No Dirty Cows to worry about. No scaling up and down to worry about. No army of expensive Kubernetes consultants. Just write some lines of code and let your favourite cloud provider(s) do all the heavy lifting. If something goes wrong then you have an SLA instead of nightmare. Several databases have also gone serverless.
Most enterprises will never ever have the scaling issues successful high tech giants have because most companies do not have customer problems and solutions that require zettabytes and nanoseconds. Technology companies are chasing a dream scenario which does not coincide with the reality of even top 100 companies.
So do enterprises really need cloud operating systems in 2020?
