There has been a remarkable market consolidation of the major cloud vendors offering IaaS public cloud computing solutions. The year was witness to a significant transition impacting all enterprises that have used cloud services from Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform. 

The transition was marked by greater ability of enterprises to choose locations to host their data across the globe and growth in number of VM instances for workload optimization. The cloud solutions offered by major cloud vendors also empowered their clients to leverage new methods to effectively analyze data in cloud while enhancing the comfort levels of cloud adoption. 

Since more and more enterprises are embracing cloud computing, there is reduced dependability on traditional data centers an enhanced tendency of moving mission critical applications to cloud service models such as (IaaS) Infrastructure as a Service . It is predicted that the following ten vital trends will govern IaaS cloud market in 2017.

Growth in Revenues

It is estimated that the overall cloud market, which is experiencing a healthy Compound Annual Growth Rate of 22 percent will boost revenues to touch $146 billion by end of the current year. A t the projected rate of growth it is predicted that the cloud market will be worth $236 billion by 2020. The growth of Platform as well as Infrastructure as a Service is considerably higher than SaaS market.
 
Considering the revenues earned by Google and Microsoft it is observed that the figures that were estimated in 2014 have been surpassed with significant margin, meaning that the cloud market is growing at a faster rate than predicted. Obviously, the same trend is expected to continue in 2017 as well. 

Birth of Cloud 2.0 

According to Frank Gens, chief analyst at IDC, the industry is witnessing dawn of new stage of Cloud 2.0 that is marked by movement of cloud adoption from experimentation towards handling enterprise IT workloads due to cloud adoption across number of enterprises. The time is not far when as many as 6 IT workloads out of 10 would be moving to cloud. It is also predicted that by 2018, close to 85 percent enterprises will embrace multi-cloud model.

It is also estimated that 70 percent revenues associated with cloud providers will be handled by brokers or channel partners. Thanks to the development of cloud as more intelligent, industry specific, and distributed solution, there will be significant expansion of market assumptions. 

Dominance of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

It is interesting to note that three major cloud vendors have equivocally stressed on importance of machine learning and artificial intelligence. This is evident from the fact that Amazon has declared three latest machine learning services, Google has released open source machine learning platform which is termed as TensorFlow, and Microsoft has offered a cloud based machine learning platform. 

This development is certainly going to facilitate common developers with ease of adopting these new technology paradigms for integration of applications that are being developed on cloud hosting platforms offered by these major vendors. 

Computing Sans Servers

The trend of serverless computing highlights the notion of building applications that are able to run minus infrastructural resource provisioning. This trend began in 2015 and is continuously gaining acceleration that would definitely continue in 2017. 

There are already some use cases including events that trigger a code or uploading of information by an IoT device into the database. The platform of serverless computing has ability to copy database entries into data warehouse and it can be applied to building applications. We can expect large number of use cases around 2017 with proliferation of Internet of Things. 

Container as New Generation Computing

In addition to machine learning and serverless computing, containers are also going to occupy place of prominence in the near future. Since containers have moved beyond the conventional composition of servers and virtual machines, these are also being associated with the nest generation computing. 

We can forecast market presence of specific tools that would facilitate container networking storage, and security. There are few cloud vendors that are offering their own platforms for achieving this. It is expected that use of containers is poised to speed up from the present level of just about 10 percent.

Unification of Hyperconverged Infrastructure and Private Cloud

The transition is no more limited to the landscape of public cloud but is also being experienced at the level of onsite infrastructure. 2017 will witness a strong shift of private cloud market from legacy cloud suites to more affordable and leaner alternatives that can be governed by PaaS capabilities, container support, and cloud management.
 
It will be common to see private clouds being built on top of hyper converged platforms. On must keep an eye on introduction o Azure stack by Microsoft that will have compatibility with Azure cloud and will be a Hyperconverged Infrastructure. 

Gaining Control on Cloud Management

Management of IaaS resources is going to be user’s responsibility. It is important that there is no over provisioning of VMs and it is also equally significant that the VMs that are not in use are turned off. Implementation of multi-factor authentication for crating robust access control measures is an essential part of cloud management.