Cloud second-quarter 2014: analysis and outlook

Table of Contents

  1. Summary
  2. Docker rises
  3. Red Hat flexes cloud muscle
  4. The government takes slow strides toward the cloud
  5. The IaaS market begins to equalize but AWS still rules
  6. Google moves away from Hadoop
  7. Large database providers struggle to stay relevant
  8. Key takeaways
  9. About David S. Linthicum

1. Summary

During the second quarter of 2014 we saw the rise of Docker as well as a few providers pushing harder to the cloud, the government finally beginning to make significant movement to the cloud, and the IaaS market looking less and less like a single provider’s domain. On the database side we saw Google, the inventor of MapReduce, move in new directions and the traditional database market continuing to die the death of a thousand cuts.

The news coming out of the cloud and database markets slowed somewhat during the second quarter when compared to the first. However, the announcements around the amount of VC dollars raised have increased, with tens of millions flowing into emerging database technology providers who are making huge bets on the emerging end of the database market — including cloud-delivered and single-purpose databases that enterprises are finally beginning to leverage.

On the cloud end of the market things continue to get more complex and fragmented. The rise of Docker is good news for most enterprise developers looking to build lightweight and cloud-portable applications. However, it could be bad news for those cloud providers promoting their own brand of application portability, both open and not. The excitement around Docker has been similar to the rise of cloud computing itself, and should (at the very least) prove to be disruptive.

In summary, here are the events of this quarter:

  • Docker rises, and rises
  • Red Hat flexes its cloud muscle
  • The government takes slow strides toward the cloud
  • The IaaS market begins to equalize but AWS still rules
  • Google moves away from Hadoop
  • Large database providers struggle to stay relevant

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