Top 10 Stories on Cloud Computing in 2023

The cloud computing landscape has seen a raft of new product and service announcements this year. In addition, efficiency, costs, and sustainability have been at the center of conversations on private data centers and public clouds for enterprises. Here are Data Center Knowledge’s top 10 cloud computing stories of 2023:   

1. A Peek Inside Microsoft's Azure Cloud Ecosystem and Data Center Innovations

Steven Hill took a virtual tour of Microsoft data centers and shared his takeaways. Microsoft seems to be taking a reasonable approach to AI and appears to offer a flexible range of services and GPU-based resources that can be scaled to meet the best combination of price, performance, and results for practically any customer use case. 

2. HPE Unveils AI Supercomputer Cloud Service 

HPE is launching an AI supercomputer cloud service, HPE GreenLake for Large Language Models (LLMs), that will enable organizations of all sizes to pursue AI projects without the cost and complexity of having to buy, install, and manage AI-specific hardware. It also announced a raft of new services, including the addition of private cloud offerings in Equinix, HPE data center switches to its network-as-as-service offering, and OpsRamp.  

3. How to Choose Between Serverless, VMs, and Containers

Related:Understanding the Cloud Lifecycle: When to Go, When to Return

To reduce costs and operate more efficiently, enterprises are looking at different virtualized computing alternatives for running applications in the cloud, including virtual machines (VMs), containers, and serverless platforms. To decide which technology is best, several factors must be considered, although generally, VMs are for compatibility, containers for flexibility, and serverless for efficiency.  

4. Pros and Cons of Choosing Colocation IaaS Over Public Cloud IaaS

Colocation providers offer IaaS solutions that can be great alternatives to public cloud IaaS solutions. But whether you should turn to a colocation company to meet your IaaS needs depends on factors like how much control you need over your infrastructure, how much you’re willing to pay, and which types of monitoring and support services you need. 

5. VMware Unveils New Multi-Cloud and Kubernetes Tools

At its VMware Explore conference, the company announced new software and cloud services that make it faster and easier for enterprises to go multicloud and build new cloud-native applications. This article will take you through some of the newly introduced products.  

6. Bare-Metal Cloud Servers vs. Bare Metal in a Private Data Center

Choosing bare-metal servers in the public cloud is fast, easy to launch, and offers greater flexibility, but it provides less control over how infrastructure is set up. The main reason to deploy a bare-metal server in a private data center is that it gives full control over how servers are configured. Therefore, organizations must consider whether convenience and flexibility should be prioritized over control, performance, and cost optimization. 

Related:Container Security in the Cloud: Understanding Concepts and Requirements

7. Why Cloud Computing Trends Suggest a Bright Future for OpenStack

Cloud computing trends mean that OpenStack, whose popularity peaked in the mid-2010s, could see a resurgence of interest. Multi-cloud architectures have gone mainstream and there is a growing cloud repatriation trend meaning that OpenStack, an open source infrastructure platform designed to construct private clouds, could see increased adoption over the next few years. You may not hear much about OpenStack these days, but it remains very active and its future may be even brighter than at any point in the past decade.  

8. Why 'Data Center vs. Cloud' Is the Wrong Way to Think

Instead of comparing “data centers” to “the cloud” in a binary fashion, the IT industry should focus more on understanding the nuances surrounding both private data centers and public clouds. This article explores the differences between both types of solutions and demonstrates that they are not as unlike in many respects as they may appear at first. 

9. Sustainable Data Centers: Just How Green Is Your Cloud Migration?

This article explores the sustainability of the cloud and on-prem. Generally, the cloud yields lower total energy consumption than hosting workloads on-prem or in private data centers. However, to establish whether this is the case for your specific workload, you should consider where your hosting facilities are located, their size and energy consumption, and how your workloads are configured. 

10. Cloud Cost Optimization Tools Buyer's Guide

The cloud cost optimization and management tools market is booming, and it can be hard to decide which solution is best suited to a given organization’s needs. This buyer’s guide looks at 14 leading tools and compares a core set of features—for example, if they offer automated savings recommendations and whether they work across multiple clouds—to help you decide which is right for you.