DEVOPSdigest

As part of DEVOPSdigest's 2020 predictions, industry experts offer predictions on how Cloud and related technologies will evolve and impact DevOps in 2020. Part 1 covers Hybrid IT and Multi-Cloud.

Start with 2020 DevOps Predictions

RETURN TO ON-PREM AND HYBRID CLOUD

Digital transformation strategies for the cloud will pull an about-face to hybrid IT environment. Companies that rushed to move all their business processes to the cloud are now finding it more expensive or cumbersome than anticipated. Over the next year, we're going to see many businesses return to the hybrid model. Despite cloud computing's recent leaps and bounds, it still can't do everything on-prem can, creating breakpoints across environments.
Ed Macosky
SVP of Product & Solutions, Boomi, a Dell Technologies business

In 2020, we'll see more organizations taking advantage of private clouds in a hybrid cloud infrastructure — storing frequently used data on-prem while continuing to utilize the public cloud for disaster recovery. Today when people refer to the cloud, they usually mean the "public" cloud. In 2020, the term "cloud" might become more nuanced as private clouds rise in popularity and organizations increasingly pursue a hybrid cloud storage strategy.
Jon Toor
CMO, Cloudian

Enterprises moved to the cloud in droves in search of better economics for their IT, but in 2020 the pendulum will swing back. The cloud will remain critical to enterprise strategies, but businesses will also seek to maximize use of their on-premises infrastructure. Many enterprises have unused capacity in their own data centers, and technologies like containers and Kubernetes make it much easier to use these resources efficiently. There's no sense deploying applications to the cloud if an on-prem data center has unused capacity, and in 2020 enterprises will use up these resources instead of automatically putting new applications in the cloud.
Ashish Thusoo
Co-Founder and CEO, Qubole

Enterprises continue to rank hybrid as the ideal IT operating model, and this will only increase in 2020. That's because it gives organizations the flexibility they need to ensure critical data and systems are protected - while taking advantage of the many cloud options to keep costs under control. Hybrid integration isn't an alternative architecture; it's the only architecture.
Ann Marie Bond
Senior Manager, Product Management, Software AG

Public cloud adoption will no doubt continue to grow at a fast pace, but there are IT leaders within all organizations who will always question where to put workloads. Because of this, the hybrid model will be around forever — well past 2025. We'll continue to see organizations put money behind a hybrid cloud approach, as IT costs become more manageable for the hybrid cloud.
Pete Salamanca
VP of Cloud Services, Apps Associates

While cloud native and serverless technology are making headlines, they represent a small fraction of currently deployed applications. We are going to deal with legacy infrastructure and monolithic architectures for the considerable future, as organizations are just doing "lift and shift" — leaving them with the same issues, just in a different location. In 2020, companies will struggle to achieve the promised benefits a migration to cloud if they do not adopt new processes and tools that continually monitor and optimize their cloud environments. The sticker-shock when seeing the bill for poorly optimized workloads that were moved to cloud will cause many cloud migrations to stall or slowdown. VMware isn't going away, on-prem isn't going away. Trends may be shifting, but legacy technologies and hybrid environments are the reality for 2020 and beyond.
Jesse Stockall
CTO, Embotics

HYBRID TAKES ON SHADOW IT

For years, Lines of Business (LOB) have aggressively adopted public cloud SaaS technologies without involving IT, because it was too difficult for IT to find resources in the data center. Budget cycles were slow and resource allocations extremely rigid. This led to LoBs spinning up their own IT operations, also known as Shadow IT. But, with technologies like kubernetes and openshift being adopted widely, IT can start saying yes. To bring some order to Shadow IT, we'll see organizations integrate hybrid strategies that allow the admin team to monitor chargebacks to each business unit, flexibly identify the right location and lifecycle for data and applications. Given that data centers will behave more like public cloud services, IT will be able to quickly move users between data centers and public cloud.
Unlike a multitude of point solutions on top of each other, causing distributed data and IT workloads, a hybrid approach provides more flexibility and centralized control. All different teams and personas have a compute environment without removing the single source of truth.
Anupam Singh
Chief Customer Officer, Cloudera

MOVING TO MULTI-CLOUD

In the year ahead, we'll see increasing demand for enterprise autonomy in cloud management and shifts in cloud leadership. As cloud adoption continues to mature, more enterprise companies are turning toward a multi-cloud approach for increased scalability, flexibility and maintaining the best-in-breed solutions for independent workloads.
Kalyan Ramanathan
VP of Product Marketing, Sumo Logic

Multi-cloud will mature for reasons of cost, efficiency and performance — and because organizations often want too deploy in closer proximity to their applications. Therefore, any integration on Azure may need to interact with services/apps on AWS and GCP, but you will need a control plane that governs them and provides holistic visibility to IT teams, so they can focus on managing applications and integration instead of infrastructure.
Ann Marie Bond
Senior Manager, Product Management, Software AG

Businesses are significantly more wary of cloud vendor lock-in than they were even a year or two ago. They are also much smarter about how they approach their use of the cloud. I have been a huge proponent of "avoid cloud lock-in" since 2015, and now it is happening in a big way. This started with the early technology company adopters of public cloud providers, but now is especially true for larger enterprises, who have gotten sticker shock at their cloud bills. Look for more enterprises to move to multi-cloud environments, including the further adoption of a "tripod" strategy consisting of two cloud services providers and on-premise infrastructure using Kubernetes to behave as a private cloud.
Peter Guagenti
CMO, MemSQL

TRUE MULTI-CLOUD

"Multi-cloud" has gained a lot of buzz these past couple years, but very few organizations have adopted a true multi-cloud strategy. Most enterprises are indeed deploying apps in several public cloud platforms, but they're typically keeping one app entirely in one cloud and another app entirely in another cloud rather than deploying a given app across several clouds. This siloing has partially been driven by creeping shadow IT practices. In 2020, this will change, however, as more and more apps will each be deployed across two or more public clouds. This true approach to multi-cloud allows organizations to better embrace microservices and enables them to optimize apps by leveraging unique features in each cloud. Furthermore, it yields better availability for each app (if one cloud goes down, you have the app in another) while also meeting certain compliance requirements (in case you need an app's data to be located in a specific region).
Ankur Singla
CEO, Volterra

OPEN SOURCE SPURS MULTI-CLOUD

Open source technologies will spur multi-cloud adoption. Open source technologies enable a common environment across different cloud environments because they are cloud agnostic, and easy to run. The ability to accommodate an array of applications and host them in any cloud or open source containers will help spur multi-cloud adoption. Public cloud providers will leverage multi-cloud deployments powered by their stacks. While the use case is still rare today, the movement will pick up in 2020, as more enterprises realize the capabilities of open source technologies in cloud environments.
Vincent Lam
Head of Cloud, Talend

MULTI-CLOUD CHALLENGES

Most companies will have more than one cloud provider. Effectively and consistently managing multiple cloud environments remains a challenge — there is no unifying layer to save money or protect the enterprise. The big cloud providers are offering tools that manage their own environments — leaving the customer with the complexity of ensuring consistency across their different environments.
As a result, organizations will realize that both their InfoSec and financial teams need to have experts in trained for each and every cloud vendor they use. Since it is not common for individuals to get certified across multiple cloud providers (ie. certified in both AWS and Azure), teams will have to navigate through the challenge of avoiding certification duplication and filling in the missing gaps accordingly.
Jesse Stockall
CTO, Embotics

MULTI-CLOUD IS WORTHLESS

I think that in 2020 enterprise tech customers will finally realize that pursuing a multi-cloud strategy is proving to be worthless. It takes enormous effort and adds a lot of complexity to build systems that can switch between different public clouds for the relatively meager benefit of hedging against outages and vendor lock-in. The goal of hedging against failures is just not meaningful when prolonged outages among major cloud providers, the kind that would require a company to shift operations to another cloud, have been practically non-existent. As for avoiding vendor lock-in, it ends up being more expensive for end-users to build the same system in multiple clouds than to build for your cloud of choice and then possibly move to another cloud if the terms or functionality get bad.
Paul Dix
CTO and Co-founder, InfluxData

Go to 2020 Cloud Predictions - Part 2