All Information Technology, this way please...

As the Gurus will tell you, technology shifts trigger market transitions every once in a few decades. For the computer age, it started with massive mainframes being replaced by more manageable minis, followed by client-server enabling web and internet tech, and most recently the shift from data centres to the Public Cloud. I just got home after a frenzied few days with 42,000 other participants at Amazon's AWS ReInvent. Choosing from over 500 sessions across two gigantic venues, the mass of humanity swirling around me had an air of astonishment as dozens of announcements were made each morning. Each announcement progressively proved a cardinal truth: EVERY tech service is moving to the Cloud. If not to Amazon's platform, then certainly to the competition's. The last six years were a period for enterprises to understand the experiment on how to migrate and manage their workloads to obtain greater agility and lower cost. This year's announcements were around how many aspects of basic software design and development are getting subsumed by native services delivered from the public cloud platforms such as AWS. Third party tools, frameworks, accelerators, solution builders -- Watch out! Your feature sets could get built into the next service artefacts announced by one of the larger Cloud platform providers. While last year's native IOT PaaS release made many enterprises wonder if it was worthwhile to host heavy on-premise solutions on the public cloud, this time it was the turn of a joint VMware-AWS service promising to put another nail in the coffin of private clouds. New services like Lex ["what is contained in Alexa"] can help build conversational interfaces from voice or text into your applications... They can integrate with Lambda [server-less service announced just last year] at the back end to trigger business functions from chat-bots... And so on and on and on... To cut a long story short, every tech service seems confidently marching towards a Public Cloud platform. A platform of your choice, but a Public Cloud platform nonetheless. Watch this space.