The Rise of Industry Specific Clouds
The cloud as we know it is ever evolving and many trend forecasters believe that the next big trend is Industry Specific Clouds. What is an industry specific cloud? It is a cloud that is optimized for the workload of a specific industry. Think of it as a highly tailored cloud infrastructure. Here is an example: let’s say your industry has an application that uses heavy database resources. The idea behind the Industry Specific Cloud is to abstract those tedious software tasks so that hardware can be utilized more efficiently to complete the task needed.
RackSpace Australia’s CTO Alan Perkins was recently noted as saying, “Cloud is ultimately about abstraction. The idea of specialized clouds makes perfect sense.” He went on to say, “Increasingly, as we move towards better virtualization and better abstraction at the software level, we’re going to be able to extend just one axis.”
This brings up an interesting dynamic in terms of the cloud. CPU, RAM and other resources are typically sold hand in hand by cloud providers. If your workload requires a specific setup, the popular idea was to throw more virtual machines at the idea. The idea behind the industry specific cloud is to get more granular than that. While the cloud is traditionally thought up as a solution to have virtual machines spin up as needed in order take on additional workload, the industry specific cloud wants to take that proposition a step further. Why spin up additional virtual machines when all you really need is a specific hardware resource on demand?
The industry specific cloud looks to make the cloud even more robust and specialized. If the idea behind Industry Specific Clouds catches on, clouds could then be setup to grab the resources they need without having to create virtual machines to accommodate that task, which dramatically decreases technical overhead and reduces the chance of a failure somewhere in the process.
