Cloud vendors are on their journey and continue to mature service offerings to ever more sophisticated levels. The current wave of innovation among the top cloud vendors suggests a continued move into more and more services that are managed by the vendor at scale and security, and reduces the cost, complexity, and risk to the customer. One way they are achieving this is by re-engineering existing technology platforms to not only deal with a specific technical problem, but by also doing it with the cloud value proposition in mind. For example, AWS has a managed database service, Amazon Aurora, built on a fully distributed and self-healing storage service deigned to keep data safe and distributed across multiple availability zones. This service increases the usefulness of the managed service offerings specific to databases, as described in the previous section, by also allowing for a storage array that grows on demand and is tuned for the cloud to provide performance of up to five times better than a similar database engine.

Not all advanced managed services are re-engineered ideas of existing technology; with the introduction of serverless computing, cloud vendors are removing undifferentiated heavy lifting away from not only operations, but also the development cycle. With the virtually limitless resources the cloud can offer, decoupling large applications into individual functions is the next big wave of distributed systems design, and leads directly into the formation of cloud native architectures.

According to AWS:

There are many types of serverless services, including compute, API proxies, storage, databases, message processing, orchestration, analytics, and developer tools. One key attribute to define whether a cloud service is serverless or only a managed offering is the way that licensing and usage are priced. Serverless leaves behind the old-world model of core-based pricing, which would imply it is tied directly to a server instance, and relies more on consumption-based pricing. The length of time a function runs, the amount of transactions per second required, or a combination of these, are common metrics that are used for consumption-based pricing with serverless offerings.

Using these existing advanced cloud native managed services, and continuing to adopt the new ones as they are released, represents a high level of maturity on the CNMM, and will enable companies to develop some of the most advanced cloud native architectures. With these services and an experienced design team, a company will be able to push the boundaries of what is possible when old-world constraints are removed and truly limitless capacity and sophistication are leveraged. For example, instead of a traditional three-tier distributed computing stack consisting of a front end web, an application, or middleware tier and an OLTP database for storage, a new approach to this design pattern would be an API gateway that uses an event-driven computing container as an endpoint, and a managed and scalable NoSQL database for persistence. All these components could fall into a serverless model, therefore allowing the design team to focus on the business logic, and not how to achieve the scale required.

Beyond serverless and other advanced managed services lies the future. Currently, the cutting edge of cloud computing is the offerings being released in the artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning space. Mature cloud vendors have services that fall into these categories with continued innovation happening on a hyperscale. It is still very early in the cycle for artificial intelligence, and design teams should expect more to come.