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Nutanix exec Indu Keri said enterprise workloads should all be built in the cloud but may not stay there
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Spikey workloads are the ones most likely to remain in the cloud
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He also predicted the industry will see a "golden age" of infrastructure innovation to keep up with the demands of technologies like VR and AI
Repatriation: is it happening or not? Apparently the answer is both yes and no, at least according to Nutanix executive Induprakas Keri. He told Silverlinings that it just makes more sense to run certain workloads on premises. But that doesn’t mean enterprises can or should avoid the cloud entirely.
“When you go and look at traditional applications which are the mainstay of enterprise IT, the adoption of those in the public cloud is still very, very early and that’s a problem for enterprises because they need to innovate,” said Keri, who is Nutanix’s SVP of Engineering.
The public cloud is the perfect environment for innovation and experimentation, Keri explained, meaning enterprises need to find a way to move to the cloud quickly. That said, he noted it’s entirely possible that the public cloud “may not be the ideal destination” for many workloads. While “spikey” workloads will likely stay in the cloud forever, those with more steady usage may be brought back on premises as they scale and cloud costs become a consideration.
But since development either way will be done in the cloud, it’s important for enterprises to take steps to avoid vendor lock-in so they can easily shift around workloads if and when the time comes.
“If you’re very dependent on the public cloud providers only on the infrastructure layer, what you would typically call IaaS, then you have a lot more flexibility to move around,” he explained.
“But if you start getting into more and more into consumption of the PaaS [platform-as-a-service] layer, then you have a lot more lock-in to a particular cloud provider.”
According to IDC data, global public cloud services revenue jumped nearly 23% in 2022 to a total of $545.8 billion. Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) accounted for $115.5 billion of that total, while PaaS accounted for 92.6 billion. Gartner’s figures for 2022 were slightly different, with IaaS raking in $115.7 billion to PaaS’ $110.7 billion in 2022. For 2023, Gartner predicted PaaS revenue would increase to $136.4 billion and IaaS to $150.3 billion.
Golden age
Speaking of cloud infrastructure, Keri said that while applications such as virtual reality (VR) and technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) tend to get all the attention, the industry is about to enter an infrastructure “golden age” for the next decade or so.
He pointed out that to make things like VR and AI a true reality, “significant innovation” needs to occur in the hybrid multi-cloud space. That means overhauling everything from overlay networking and software defined networking to bare metal availability and storage.
“Current infrastructure is not going to get the best out of AI workloads,” he said. “You’re going to keep the GPUs idle for 99.9% of the time with current storage and networking technologies. So, we need to go bypass that and we need to go through a bunch of innovation. I think those are two great things we’re going to see a lot of over the coming years.”