As the new year approaches, it's a good time to look forward to what the key trends will be, so we can take advantage of them thoughtfully and effectively.
Here are three key cloud trends I'm certain you'll see unfold in 2016.
Trend 1: The continued rise of cloudops
Cloudops is anything to do with operating systems in public or private clouds. It focuses on security, management, monitoring, and governance, as well as being proactive with how systems run over a long period of time.
Doing so means using predictive analytics to determine when performance will become an issue, or when you see patterns emerge that show the likelihood of a breach.
Trend 2: The continued explosion of containers
I've beaten the container horse to death in this blog, so I'm not going into the "what's a container" pitch (go here instead for the key container notions). They are growing in popularity because they push a commonsense approach to building new distributed applications in the cloud, as well as "containerizing" existing applications.
The good news is that containers are living up to expectations, including containers from Docker and CoreOS.
The bad news: There are still missing pieces, such as networking and security services, that need to be shored up before this stuff is completely enterprise-ready. Expect container technology providers and their partners to address most of the limitations in 2016.
Trend 3: More focus on training and certification
Cloud computing needs people who can build, run, and design clouds -- even talk clouds. We don't have enough of these people now, so let's get more through training and use certifications to ensure they know their stuff.
The number of training companies focused on cloud is exploding, and there are certification offerings, both from the providers themselves such as Amazon Web Services and Google, and from training companies that provide more general training.
People in IT who did not buy into the cloud a few years ago will find themselves in cloud classes next year. Redemption!
Thus, 2016 will be the year when we fill in more missing pieces of the cloud computing story. The year, as a whole, will see more evolution than revolution.