As I have been exploring the maturing environment of cloud services, I am regularly struck by the richness of the environments and the dramatic shift to “getting it done” with microservices, versus the legacy thinking of stack based development. There is much to dig into from an interoperability, scaling, global security model and more, but at present, the top three players in the space are offering a broad array of options that are sparking my thinking across a range of options and need spaces. 

1.  AWS (Amazon Web Services)
2. AZURE(Microsoft Cloud Services)
3. Google Cloud Functions

The next level of maturity is an established pattern for integration, that uses global security models to facilitate interop, with a common set of controls that sit on top and are referenced across all platforms and data stacks. Getting to the granular, element level in the data lake, secured by role and user is critical in the emerging privacy world. There is a clear need to have the capability to have a single world view of a person, or a resource across these platforms, abstracting the security model in a scalable way for both development and user engagement. 

I am seeing articles pointing to this general thinking, but still not satisfied with a common “glue” or abstraction layer for these unified visions. I look forward to seeing this emerge, and being a part of that solution to the extent I am able.

I wrote a previous post about moving back into development (at least on the edges) and part of that is exploring the best play for cloud compute.  One of the articles I came across was this one from the Google Cloud Platform. 

Opening Quote from the article: 

A multi-cloud strategy can help organizations leverage strengths of different cloud providers and spread critical workloads. For example, maybe you have an existing application on AWS but want to use Google’s powerful APIs for Vision, Cloud Video Intelligence and Data Loss Prevention, or its big data and machine learning capabilities to analyze and derive insights from your data.

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/going-multi-cloud-with-google-cloud-endpoints-and-aws-lambda

While I cannot claim much experience with the Google cloud offering, I can say I am enthused by this idea and approach. This represents so much to me, but one of the most significant is a changing of the guard that the current era of interop represents. I mentioned in prior posts that I started in the technical journey back in the earlier days (let’s leave it at that) and the platform religion was strong. What we see clearly in this article is a recognition that we are now in a world where we have increasing platform independence and are more free to focus on solution, and the best each has to offer – exciting times indeed.