As technical debt grows in the cloud, Google could ultimately challenge Microsoft and AWS, says analyst

CLOUD

In the aftermath of many new services introduced by Amazon Web Services Inc. at the recently concluded re:Invent 2021, an important question has been raised: Is the cloud beginning to build technical debt?

The re:Invent keynote from Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels, in particular, was packed with a host of announcements, ranging from an offering of M1 Mac mini instances for EC2 to a Cloud WAN running on AWS infrastructure.

Although software companies such as HashiCorp Inc. offer multicloud infrastructure automation products, one analyst warns that technical debt, the implied cost of additional refactoring in the stack down the line, is building.

“We have started to accumulate technical debt, even in cloud,” said cloud strategist Sarbjeet Johal (pictured). “HashiCorp is sitting on the side there, but there is another abstraction layer on top of that which was announced during Werner’s keynote. The new abstraction layers leave the previous architectures a little stale. It’s getting busy, complicated; there’s a lot of services.”

Johal spoke with John Furrier and David Nicholson, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio at AWS re:Invent. They discussed the need for consolidation of cloud services and the competitive landscape among the three largest public clouds. (* Disclosure below.)

Service overload

Johal’s concern is rooted in the sheer number of cloud services that AWS now offers enterprises today, which has grown to well over 200. Other major cloud providers have continued to expand service portfolios as well.

“Two hundred-plus services or whatever that number is today, it’s mind-boggling,” Johal said. “My request to all cloud providers, mainly three, is to not call everything a new service. Call it a feature of a service. The number of new services has to be reduced, collapsed if you will.”

The volume of announcements from AWS re:Invent brought further attention to the competitive landscape for cloud providers. In terms of market share, AWS continues to dominate, with Microsoft Corp. in second place. Google Cloud remains a distant third, but Johal believes that could change.

“I think Google’s cloud has legs,” Johal said. “They are a very engineering-focused company and more open-source friendly, data-science friendly as well. I’m a developer by heart, and they are a number two cloud after Amazon.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: This is an unsponsored editorial segment. However, theCUBE is a paid media partner for AWS re:Invent. AWS and other sponsors of theCUBE’s event coverage have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE