Cloud Computing Will Continue to Have Legs in 2015

All you have to do get a guage on how hot open cloud computing is is check the job listings. Opportunities abound for those with OpenStack skills, for example.

But there are strong signs that some of the big growth in cloud computing may lie ahead, and Amazon, the 800-pound gorilla in the cloud, may face much stiffer competition.

The cloud infrastructure market was $3.6 billion last year, reports IDC, but it will expand 31 percent a year through 2018. Amazon owns 40 percent of the market says IDC. In most market share reports, Microsoft Google and IBM each have under 10 percent of the market.

Meanwhile, the OpenStack Foundation's survey from late last year showed very clearly that some IT departments were still evaluating OpenStack instead of actually deploying it.

In a recent appearance at the HP Discover conference in Barcelona, TomNorton, head of HP's OpenStack services group, said that trend may still be in place.  Most customers “are still looking at [OpenStack] for a singular workload or looking for an environments that supports a test case,” he said, citing OpenStack's complexity.

In 2015, we are likely to see many more actual deployments of OpenStack.

Meanwhile, many news outlets are covering the close competition in public cloud services. As CNBC notes, you can get a glimpse of the competition from the price cutting going on:

"AWS has cut prices 46 times since its 2006 launch, while Google has slashed prices 38 percent this year and is actually cheaper than AWS for many of its on-demand machines, according to an October blog post from cloud management provider RightScale. For either service, businesses are paying as little as 6 or 7 cents an hour for a server, and Microsoft has vowed to stay competitive on price."

Synergy Research Group and other market share trackers have shown reports of Microsoft gaining market share with its Azure service, which now embraces many open platforms and technologies under new CEO Satya Nadella, who came originally from the cloud group at Microsoft and has expressed his "love of open source."

And, Google promises to do big things in the cloud in 2015 as well. Let's not forget that the company has $62 billion in cash, and that many users already depend on its core tools such as GMail and Google Drive.

While Amazon still rules the roost, we'll see much competition in the cloud space next year.