DEVOPSdigest

DEVOPSdigest asked DevOps experts — analysts and consultants, users and the top vendors — for their predictions on how DevOps and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2019. Part 8, covers microservices and containers.

Start with 2019 DevOps Predictions - Part 1

Start with 2019 DevOps Predictions - Part 2

Start with 2019 DevOps Predictions - Part 3

Start with 2019 DevOps Predictions - Part 4

Start with 2019 DevOps Predictions - Part 5

Start with 2019 DevOps Predictions - Part 6

Start with 2019 DevOps Predictions - Part 7

KUBERNETES AND DOCKER HAVE EVEN GREATER IMPACT

While technologies like Kubernetes and Docker are certainly not new for 2019 (or even 2018 for that matter), we're going to start to see these technologies have an even greater impact for 2019. One example of how we expect to see this in practice is with Kubernetes. In the past, the definition of your architecture may have been looser — you would have a general understanding of documentation and requirements, but not a strictly defined blueprint for how things will run in production. In 2019, we expect to see the definition of your application through the lens of these technologies really firm up and become a model for production.
Anders Wallgren
CTO, Electric Cloud(link is external)

The world of CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery) is being shaken up by container and container orchestration technology. Kubernetes is absolutely essential to successfully managing large container deployments, while Docker brings numerous advantages for applications. When done right, container orchestration tools can greatly decrease the complexity of working with infrastructure. As containers become the norm in 2019, DevOps engineers will have to adapt to this new tool chain.
Jawahar Malhotra
SVP of Engineering, HackerRank(link is external)

Kubernetes is now 3.5 years old, the technology has matured, and adoption of containerized applications orchestrated by Kubernetes has scaled beyond tiger teams. Enterprises are more comfortable with Kubernetes and by default more comfortable with containers. When comparing our 2017 Docker Usage Report to our 2018 Docker Usage Report, we noticed an increase in the usage of two database solutions — PostgreSQL and MongoDB — running in containers. We predict that is only the beginning: Enterprises will migrate mission-critical, stateful applications to Kubernetes in droves in 2019.
Loris Degioanni
CTO and Founder, Sysdig(link is external)

For 2019, I see a year full of Kubernetes. Kubernetes is going to make all things DevOps much easier. The Kubernetes ecosystem is inching towards a world of more robust database and storage offerings. Next year, I feel we will have numerous benefits from Kubernetes, but most importantly, we will have improved access as well as security controls.
Claire Giordano
VP, Citus Data(link is external)

KUBERNETES BECOMES THE NEW OPERATING SYSTEM

Kubernetes' ability to simplify and speed up software development and deployment, along with it's ability to parallelize development, will solidify Kubernetes as the new data center operating system in 2019. In all respects, Kubernetes is driving an IT revolution.
Reuven Harrison
CTO and Co-founder, Tufin(link is external)

Kubernetes keeps climbing as the contender to power Cloud 2.0. In 2018, Kubernetes emerged as the de-facto cloud orchestration layer after having organized the container chaos across the industry. But we're still very much in the early days of Kubernetes — and as the software ecosystem around containers grows (i.e. performance, tracing, cloud monitoring) in 2019, Kubernetes will become more than just the orchestration layer. It will become the operating system as we move to Cloud 2.0, the next phase of cloud technology that is intelligent and business-driven — and that uses true multi-cloud strategies.
Ravi Mayuram
CTO, Couchbase(link is external)

CONTAINER TOOLS IMPROVE

Tooling around containers will improve. Areas like debugging, packaging, code editors and others are still years behind the non-container ones. We won't reach maturity in the next year, but I expect things to improve around the container-development experience.
Edson Yanaga
Director, Developer Experience, Red Hat(link is external)

SECOND WAVE OF CONTAINERS

While we've already seen a rapid adoption of things like Docker because it is relatively easy to get up-and-running, we expect to see a second wave of container approaches in 2019. Things like application release orchestration will help to alleviate the disconnect between the developers and their vision of the architecture for an application, and ops and their vision for how it has to be run.
Anders Wallgren
CTO, Electric Cloud(link is external)

LESS CONTAINER TALK

People will stop talking about containers. Containers are the hottest topic in enterprise IT since the cloud itself. For a while, everyone was obsessed with what technology leaders like Google were doing with the technology, and the top three topics of conversation at any DevOps meetup were containers, containers, and containers. But as the rubber hits the road, enterprises are increasingly driven by what containers allow them to achieve — multi-cloud operations, highly-available global scale applications — rather than the technology itself. So as container adoption radically accelerates, people counterintuitively talk less about containers, and more about the apps and services that containers enable.
Murli Thirumale
Co-Founder and CEO, Portworx(link is external)

TRANSITION TO MICROSERVICES ACCELERATES

The transition from monolithic to microservices-based development will accelerate. To be effective, the transition will require development organizations to rethink their structure, as well as the tools they are using. This includes agile methodologies like squad-based development, and also things like feature management technologies, and even monitoring solutions.
Ronit Belson
COO, Rollout.io(link is external)

In 2019, DevOps will drive software architecture evolution and innovation. Many companies have either tried to take their current monolithic apps and workloads into the cloud or have tried to practice DevOps with old architecture, and it's not working well for them. There will be a drive for the modernization of software architecture into microservices and distributed architecture to better take advantage of DevOps processes and tooling.
Bhanu Singh
VP Product Development and Cloud Operations, OpsRamp(link is external)

MICROSERVICES CHALLENGES

In 2019, we will start to see the determinants of rushing to adopt microservices. One danger of moving to service-based architecture is people don't fully understand how large services can become. There are groups creating microservice architecture that instead of one monolith system, they created 10 monolith systems. This makes their services too large and doesn't fix the problems of a monolith. On the other hand, those services might make your services too small, which means all your complexity goes from being a team problem to a system problem that's harder than your average developer to understand.
Lee Atchison
Senior Director, Strategic Architecture, New Relic(link is external)

MICROSERVICES BACKLASH

Microservices walk-back: Many companies who have experimented with Microservices will walk back toward more traditional middleware approaches. We will see a resurgence of well-managed, governed API platforms as many companies will find the complexity and overhead begged by Microservices is not warranted for many of their use cases nor supportable in their organizations.
Andy Pemberton
VP of Solution Architecture, OutSystems(link is external)

2019 will be the year we find out about tradeoffs for microservices in a big way. We'll see a major company pulling back on microservices saying that managing hundreds of small services is more difficult than fewer. The gains for development are offset by operational costs, availability planning and more. It won't be everybody, but we will see a rising in the anti-microservices movement in 2019.
Michael Stahnke
Sr. Director of Engineering, Puppet(link is external)

Microservices might be entering the trough of disillusionment stage. I expect that in the next year we'll start to see the testimonies of teams and organizations that failed when adopting microservices. We'll realize that microservices is not a silver bullet (nothing is), but it's very useful in some particular situations. Expect some consolidation on the best practices.
Edson Yanaga
Director, Developer Experience, Red Hat(link is external)

Read 2019 DevOps Predictions - Part 9, the final installment of 2019 DevOps predictions, covering more about microservices, containers and APIs.