Amido Tech Trends 2018

What’s all the FaaS about?

Cloud Computing, the Internet of Things,

Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and the Demise of the

CIO are integraltrends over the next

18 months

Trend 1

Commoditisation through the Cloud

Trend 2IoT is on the Edge

Trend 3AI: Machine Learning

Trend 4No Vendor Agenda

CONTENTS

Cloud is here - and with the immense growth in the cloud market comes the much needed commoditisation of services, which is a good

thing for everyone.

Imagine trying to build something with a combination of lego and stickle bricks; it results in hand-cranked products that don’t work well

together and are expensive to build.

Commoditisation brings standardisation This allows for inexpensive products to be

delivered at scale that work with other products in the ecosystem and opens the door to

technologies, such as blockchain, to enable distributed trust.

Featured in this report is what we see as significant cloud growth areas. COMMODITISATION

THROUGH THE

CLOUD

The commoditisation of IT started with the cloud. Cloud computing enabled the creation of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), IaaS enabled the creation of Platform as a Service (PaaS) and PaaS enabled the creation of Software as a Service (SaaS) and the emerging Functions as a Service (FaaS) or Backend as a Service (BaaS) – most commonly referred to as:

Event Driven Computing FaaS/Serverless

The significance of FaaS for businesses could be huge

Businesses will no longer have to pay for the redundant use of servers, but just for how much computing power that application consumes per millisecond, much like the per-second billing approach that containers are moving towards.

Instead of having an application on a server, the business can run it directly from the cloud allowing it to choose when to use it and pay for it, per task – thus making it event driven1.

FaaS is a commoditised function of cloud computing and one that takes away wasted compute associated with idle server storage and infrastructure.

If you’re considering FaaS as an option you are signing up to the ultimate in vendor lock-in as it’s not easy to move these services from cloud to another. Each cloud provider approaches FaaS in a different way and at present you can’t take a function and move it between vendors.

As the demand for serverless technologies grow, the nature of DevOps will subsequently change.

It will still be relevant, although how we go about doing it will be very different.

What’s the FaaS about?

We could say that we are moving into a world of NoOps where applications run themselves in the cloud with no infrastructure and little human involvement. Indeed, humans will need to be there to help automate those services, but won’t be required to do as much coding or testing as they do now.

w

Gartner states that by 2020, event-sourced, real-time situational awareness will be a required

characteristic for 80% of digital business solutions, and 80% of new business ecosystems will require

support for event processing.Gartner explanation of Event- Driven: Digital businesses rely on the ability to sense and be ready to exploit new digital business moments. Business events reflect the discovery of notable states or state changes, such as completion of a purchase order. Some business events or combinations of events constitute business moments — a detected situation that calls for some specific business action. The most consequential business moments are those that have implications for multiple parties, such as separate applications, lines of business or partners.

1.

Serverless computing

Serverless is a hot topic in the world of software architecture, but the first usage of the term can be spotted back in 2012 in the context of continuous integration.

With the launch of AWS Lambda in 2014, the term started to attract more attention from outside the developer community.

“Not every business is going to be right for FaaS

or serverless, but there is a real appetite in the industry

to reduce the cost of adopting the cloud – so this is a great way to help drive

these costs down.”

Richard SlaterPrincipal Consultant

Amido

With the advent of AI, the IoT, and other technologies, business events can be detected more quickly and analysed in greater detail.

Enterprises should embrace ‘event thinking’ and Lambda Architectures as part of a digital landscape.

Netflix runs on AWS Lambda which is an event-driven, serverless computing platform that has doubled its size from 12% in 2016, to 23% in 2017.

This, together with the increasing adoption of Containers shows that whilst these approaches to enterprise software delivery are early in their adoption curve, they are becoming a viable solution as companies want to adopt agile solutions and manage the cost of the cloud.

AWS states that 1 in 4 respondents from its survey are actually using containers and Amido is already working with forward-thinking organisations to align business strategies with digital and IT transformation to enable growth.

“We are going to see an increasingly rapid move to commoditised services enabling business and customer value to be delivered at pace to those who are willing to invest in these technologies. Experimentation and learning are pivotal to being able to understand these technologies.

Consider giving over 10 to 20% of the time of your engineering teams to focus on experimental products – this does wonders for staff morale and skills. In addition, it can even deliver some tangible business value over time,” says Richard.

Event-Driven Case: Netflix and AWS Lambda

Alex Hilton, CEO of The Cloud Industry Forum concludes: “The cloud industry is evolving at a pace and over the past year we’ve seen some really interesting examples of how cloud can fuel digital disruption and intersect with other next generation technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and IoT. This will continue into 2018, though we expect the industry to start focusing more closely on cloud outcomes. This will offer businesses a better understanding of how the trailblazers and disruptors are really innovating in the market.”

TREND 2 – IoT IS ON THE EDGE

Richard SlaterPrincipal Consultant

AMIDO

“We can’t talk about IoT without sharing my favourite quote from

Twitter:

Docker container adoption in AWS grew from 18% to 25% in nine months in 2017.

‘In a relatively short time we’ve taken a system built

to resist destruction by nuclear weapons and made

it vulnerable to toasters’

and he’s dead right!”

IoT is on the Edge

IoT has contributed to a serious rise in the types and the amount of datasets generated meaning there needs to be a way to aggregate, analyse and distribute that data from the ‘things’ and send it back to the ‘things,’ quicker.

Traffic

lights

Customer

Mobile device

Web app / service

Wearable health�

care device

Smart building

Industrial

equipment

Business

partner

Production line

HVAC system

Employee

barcode

The proliferation of things connected to the internet has meant that Edge Computing is

important for all industries.

The next wave will be for the compute to move from the cloud towards the edge giving the objects the ability to make intelligent real-time decisions; a car needs to make a split-second decision on whether it should apply the brakes to avoid an accident, for example. Edge computing holds data analysed from the cloud that is immediately passed to the object for instantaneous updates and responses.

Currently, Edge computing technology such as AWS Greengrass collects data and processes it from nearby items to send it back to the cloud where analytics and Machine Learning can take place in order to make decisions - or make sense of the data - before sending the data back to the edge and then to the things – to make them more intelligent.

Cloud to the Edge Data distribution is essential to improve customer experience in industries like manufacturing, healthcare and retail.

Research firm IHS predicts: IoT will grow to reach a staggering

75 billion devices by 2025.

This 4th Indus trial

Revolution or Indu

is hotter than hell

right now. Steve JonesPrincipal ConsultantAMIDO

“

“‘

‘

stry 4.0

As AMRC Sheffield launches its Factory 2050 to facilitate the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0), the potential for Edge Computing within Industrial IoT is accelerating.

It is the UK’s first state of the art factory entirely dedicated to conducting collaborative research into reconfigurable robotic, digitally assisted assembly and machining technologies.

Big data technology processes large volumes of information, collected by sensors on each machine, cell and the building itself to enable automation - without forsaking the need for humans. Yet, humans will benefit from sensors within a factory or at a hospital, for instance.

Fujitsu with its UBIQUITOUSWARE takes an immersed reality with its products that enable humans to do a better job with the use of real-time analytics and data collected from other scenarios. If you fell in the factory or if there’s a potential danger, edge technology and sensors can feed and receive this information directly to and from the worker.

“As Phillip Hammond mentioned in the recent Budget, we are on the verge of a technical revolution and this 4th Industrial Revolution or ‘Industry 4.0’ is hotter than hell right now,” said Steve Jones, Principal Consultant at Amido.

IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things)

The UK Government recently (October 2017) published a consultation paper “Made Smarter Review” which references the World Economic Forum’s prediction that Digital Industry Transformation represents a USD $100 trillion opportunity.

Coupled with the well documented and pressing need for the UK Government to address the weak productivity of the UK economy, we can expect to see a lot of focus in this area over the next few years.

There are roughly 6.4 billion data-communicating objects in the world right now and this number is forecast to triple by 2020 (Accenture). The overwhelming majority of these objects will be “things” - whether cars, white goods or industrial assets: smart machines.

IIoT will enable data-driven manufacturing, where process and floor-wide monitoring are able to optimise efficiency and quality (through the application of machine learning to big data).

This is being heralded as the revolution that will introduce huge productivity boosts to industry.

“Machines can cause harm – robots that know when humans

are close and slow down to protect them are an important part of the Industry 4.0 or IIoT

revolution.”

Richard SlaterPrincipal Consultant

AMIDO

These smart machines - featuring a multitude of

sensors, automation proficiency and machine-to-machine

communication capability - constitute the IIoT.

Amido sees the rising need for high variation and mass customisation of manufacturing throughout a diverse range of engineering sectors to shorten lead times and optimise costs accumulated throughout the supply chain, and that can rapidly ramp production up or down to meet demand.

With the evolution of IoT and the vastly larger data sets that are streaming into the cloud, it would be impractical to try and process that quantity of data in real-time. However you can use AI and event sourcing to summarise and generate actionable insights.

Machine Learning (ML) and its use within digital transformation programmes is also starting to mature. Whilst a survey by MIT Sloan showed that only 23 percent of businesses have adopted machine learning automation of any kind, and of those who have, only five percent are using it extensively.

AI: Machine Learning

“We find ourselves having more conversations with our clients about building ML into what would traditionally be an ETL process (extract, transform and load), rather than it being something that tech teams aspire towards,” concludes Simon Evans CTO of Amido.

TREND 3 – AI: MACHINE LEARNING

“We are starting to have different conversations with our clients. I remember talking to a leading online retailer some three years

ago about how they could use ML - but it is only now starting to materialise and gain some traction.”

Simon Evans, CTO, AMIDO

Gartner: 59% of organisations are

still gathering information to build their AI strategies, while the remainder have already made progress in

piloting or adopting AI solutions.

Businesses wanting to make use of data - structured and unstructured – to stimulate intelligent decisions and spot trends across all departments, businesses should be looking at data engineering, data lakes and ML in a practical way, identifying data sets that would provide the most benefit from building a machine learning capability such as fraud or purchase recommendations and up/cross-sell. “We are helping businesses make use of these ML applications and exploit their benefits– in turn aiding the automation of processes received from the Data Driven Economy.”

Amido sees the ML trend evolving within organisations and it is the pooling together of data married with deep analytics that will enable a specific task, such as understanding language or driving a vehicle in a controlled environment, with the algorithms chosen that are optimised for that task.

The Demise of the

CIO and The Rise of

DevOps

TREND 4 - NO VENDOR AGENDA

With FaaS and serverless gaining momentum, we are seeing the

responsibility of what to choose and how to deploy applications

distributed back to the business.“This really leaves us with the

question: with this new wave of computing, what role is the CIO to play now when there isn’t the

same level of vendor negotiations?” suggests Richard Slater, Principal

Consultant at Amido.

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There is a fundamen

change happening

w ith how technology is not

only being purchased but how

it s delivered and

operated.

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tal

No Vendor Agenda: The Demise of the CIO and The Rise of DevOps“Cloud providers are basically the same price across the board so there’s not much to negotiate on, other than length of contract – signing up to long-term single-cloud contracts introduces the risk of having a spending commitment with a cloud that doesn’t offer the features that you need in the future to deliver business value. In this respect, the CIO is still necessary,” continues Richard.

As business leaders, the need to let go of the ‘command and control’ approach and empower teams to be accountable for delivering against a market proposition is becoming ever more important. Creating the environment and securing the right skillsets to be able to develop, own and operate applications from within the same team is demanding for a new breed of IT engineering.

IT Skills for cross-platform, multi-functional engineering is born out of the growth of the cloud computing market. “DevOps is more than just development and operations,” continues Richard. “It’s really ‘DevQASecHRLegalRiskFinanceOps,’ and Gene Kim has put forward the concept of Systems Thinking as one of the three ways of DevOps. If we honestly look at the systems we use to deliver business value, then we will find that there isway more than Dev and Ops involved in success.”

One of the primary reasons that Agile and DevOps transformations fail is the lack of trust and thus

accountability placed in the product development teams.

Organisations wanting to adopt Agile, Cloud and DevOps must

start to give trust to the individuals closest to the business

and writing code on the ground. “To a certain extent this trust must be earned, but in many of today’s

enterprises there is so much governance around

technical delivery that it has the effect

of slamming the brakes on any

transformation,” concludes

Richard Slater, Principal

Consultant at Amido.

Following a lean approach, we adhere to agile engineering principles for software development and delivery. We plan, run and evaluate our work in incremental, iterative sprints in order to continually assure that the solution being delivered is the right one.

Talk to us,we’ll show you how.Get in touch by email london@amido.comor call us on 0203 176 4690.

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As a technology consultancy that understands how important it is to know your customers, our work includes advising brands and implementing solutions that improve how their customers engage with them on their digital platforms, introducing social sign-up for better engagement of user accounts and by ensuring a frictionless experience during the checkout process.

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Amido, a vendor-agnostic technical consultancy specialising in cloud-first transformation, shares its expertise on the technology trends that will impact business across all sectors for the next 18 months. With trends from the last five years taking hold, the trend evolution cycles are becoming shorter, increasing the demand for specialised IT skills that can cater to digital transformation.

We work with brands like ASOS, CBRE, Global Radio, London City Airport and Coats to remove friction from their customers’ online and mobile experiences to drive revenue and engagement. From social sign-in to smart content delivery and smooth transactions, we help brands build loyalty through customer recognition by bridging systems in a powerful and unique way, yielding real-time results for brands and their customers.