۱- Introduction

۲- Changing infrastructure

۳- Emerging computing architectures

۴- Avenues of impact

۵- Research directions

۶- Summary

References

Abstract

The landscape of cloud computing has significantly changed over the last decade. Not only have more providers and service offerings crowded the space, but also cloud infrastructure that was traditionally limited to single provider data centers is now evolving. In this paper, we firstly discuss the changing cloud infrastructure and consider the use of infrastructure from multiple providers and the benefit of decentralising computing away from data centers. These trends have resulted in the need for a variety of new computing architectures that will be offered by future cloud infrastructure. These architectures are anticipated to impact areas, such as connecting people and devices, data-intensive computing, the service space and self-learning systems. Finally, we lay out a roadmap of challenges that will need to be addressed for realising the potential of next generation cloud systems.

Introduction

Resources and services offered on the cloud have rapidly changed in the last decade. These changes were underpinned by industry and academia led efforts towards realising computing as a utility [1]. This vision has been achieved, but there are continuing changes in the cloud computing landscape which this paper aims to present. Applications now aim to leverage cloud infrastructure by making use of heterogeneous resources from multiple providers. This is in contrast to how resources from a single cloud provider or data center were used traditionally. Consequently, new computing architectures are emerging. This change is impacting a number of societal and scientific areas. In this discussion paper, we consider ‘what future cloud computing looks like’ by charting out trends and directions for pursuing meaningful research in developing next generation computing systems as shown in Fig. 1. The remainder of this paper is organised as follows. Section 2 presents a discussion of the evolving infrastructure on the cloud. Section 3 highlights the emerging computing architectures and their advantages. Section 4 considers a number of areas that future clouds will impact. Section 5 sets out a number of challenges that will need to be addressed for developing next generation cloud systems. Section 6 concludes this paper.