Where is the public cloud heading? How can small and medium-sized enterprises work with the technology? And what role does the partner ecosystem play in choosing a public cloud provider? At the invitation of EuroCloud Deutschland_eco e. V. (EuroCloud), cloud initiative providers from all over Germany recently met in Frankfurt. The reason? To set up a cloud initiative.
Pooling interests, promoting exchange, and expanding understanding of the market and its providers – these are the goals pursued by EuroCloud Native, or ECN for short. The new EuroCloud Cloud Native initiative has now been launched in Frankfurt – a kick-off which Dr. Nils Kaufmann, Head of EuroCloud Native, describes as a meeting amongst friends of the cloud. And a hybrid event which, in adhering to all distance and hygiene rules, could only be attended by 30 people on location, but which was attended by a similar number of guests in the live stream.
Flexible cloud-native solutions, agile cloud-native market
Highly flexible and resilient, optimally standardised and scalable – features like these are the hallmarks of cloud-native applications. Such applications are in part developed and operated entirely in the public cloud, which requires specialist know-how. “The market and providers are therefore as agile as the solutions themselves,” according to Peter Fuchs, Partner & Alliances Lead Germany at Amazon Web Services. Almost every week, the public cloud providers are producing innovations. “If you want to keep up with the pace, you need to know your way around and apply a focus,” added Emily Ryan, Head of Customer Engineering, Digital Natives and Mid-Market DACH at Google Cloud.
A focus that is also necessary for service providers for other reasons: “The customer’s interest is not that of cloud infrastructure and cloud technology,” said Henning von Kielpinski, Technical Account Manager at Google. “Challenges and questions from business decision- makers are driving cloud-native solutions – not the other way around,” stated Michael Hanisch, CTO, Amazon Web Services EMEA.
Public cloud applications: Loosely paired, robust design
Whether it’s containers or microservices, elastic or serverless – cloud-native architectures consist of small software applications that are loosely paired with one another. The distributed structure makes the applications more robust. If a service fails, the entire system remains functional. A powerful coming-together was also important for the kick-off. “EuroCloud Native is seeking to develop a shared industry awareness,” said Kaufmann. And this independent of which public cloud service the providers work with. “We see the initiative as a cross-functional and independent partner network,” said Thomas Noglik, Board Member of EuroCloud. “It’s intended that customers and providers come together in the ECN to share knowledge more easily.”
Cloud Native initiative bringing hyperscalers into the business
Exchanging experiences, developing opinions, and networking – in the afternoon hyperscaler and cloud natives were brought into dialogue with each other. “Just a few years ago, hardly anyone was interested in the cloud,” said Sven Ramuschkat, Founder and Managing Director at AWS partner tecRacer. “Today you can’t get anywhere without it!” Something which is not seen differently by Google Partner Cloudworthy: “Our customers must benefit from the cloud,” said Business Development Manager Florian Kicherer. “Together with Google, we therefore position topics with our clients.” A simple formula for success, with which the cloud natives can also score points elsewhere. Because: “Cloud natives break down the size of the public cloud providers and the complexity of the technology for customers,” said Heiko Henkes, Director & Principal Analyst at ISG Germany. “This is how cloud natives are bringing hyperscalers into the business.”
What the new interest group now brings to the suppliers: “The market must become more transparent – for customers and stakeholders,” noted Mario Apitz, Founder and CEO at Alice&Bob.Company in the closing discussion round. What will this entail? “Common quality standards,” according to Julian Hansert, Co-Founder and COO at Kubermatic. “Not only for the cloud-native solutions themselves, but also for the next generation.” And they are urgently needed: “In fact, there is no dedicated training for this area of work,” said Marc Sundermann, founder and CEO at Cloudeteer. “The experts of tomorrow either train themselves up, or are recruited from the software community.”
Cloud Native Initiative will continue to pave the way for the success of the public cloud
To ensure that the ECN achieves its goals, Andreas Weiss, Director at EuroCloud, assured the new initiative of start-up aid. “EuroCloud Native will continue to pave the way for the success of the public cloud in Germany.” In order to achieve this, the initiative wants to reach out to every cloud native provider: “We want to be a platform for all public clouds,” said Head Kaufmann. The founding members of EuroCloud Native are Alice&Bob.Company, Cloudeteer, Cloud Mates, Cloudwürdig, Innovations ON, Kubermatic, MGT-Commerce and tecRacer.
Become a member now! Are you interested in the EuroCloud Native offer? Further information is available (in the German language) at www.eurocloud.de/cloudnative.
