DEVOPSdigest

DevOps experts — analysts and consultants, users and the top vendors — offer thoughtful, insightful, often controversial and sometimes contradictory predictions on how DevOps and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2017. Part 4 covers containers and microservices.

Start with 2017 DevOps Predictions - Part 1

Start with 2017 DevOps Predictions - Part 2

Start with 2017 DevOps Predictions - Part 3

27. CONTAINERIZATION GOES MAINSTREAM

2017 will be the year of microservices and containers. IT teams who are simply playing around with containers right now, will begin to understand how they can utilize them through container management.
Jason Hand
DevOps Evangelist, VictorOps

Read Jason Hand's blog: Continuous Improvement: The By-Product of Monitoring

On the technology front, we will see increasing popularity of containerization solutions because of their ability to provide a consistent environment from development to production. Next year it will be more popular with non-production environments, and as it matures it will see similar popularity for production environments. One of the key reasons for this popularity is its portability across multi-cloud platforms.
Tan Moorthy
Head of Global Services for Application Development and Management (ADM), Infosys

2016 saw the next evolution of container technology with the creation of persistent, highly available, scalable containers storage. Many SME and Enterprise customers have started to test and prepare these systems for production. In 2017, these developments will change the landscape not just for DevOps but for all enterprises wishing to drive down cost and decrease time to market. In 2017, we will see even greater adoption of containers by service providers and enterprises of all sizes as companies continue to develop in the cloud. The winners will be the ones focused on leveraging existing investments and maintaining business control, while delivering ease of use and sophisticated integration to make developers lives easy.
Chris Brandon
CEO and Founder, StorageOS

The new generation of business applications will continue to use new approaches in order to properly address the scalability requirements: virtual computing, containers or microservices. In a typical environment these applications are also integrated in order to provide higher level business workflow automation. Ability to discover, visualize, configure, backup and monitor modern IT applications requires new approaches than the standard server-centric or VM-centric approach.
Goran Garevski
VP of Engineering, Comtrade Software

28. CONTAINER HYPE DIES DOWN

People will talk less about containers in 2017 and more about applications. Technology comes in waves. When containers exploded a couple years ago, it was all containers, all the time. But containers only serve to make applications easier to build, ship and run to borrow a phrase. People will think more about applications overall in 2017, rather than just the components that make them up.
Serge Pashenkov
CTO, ClusterHQ

I think people will start to realize that the software running on top of various container technologies is more important than any of the container platforms or the technologies these platforms are made of. Hype around containers and these technologies will dissipate, and real production environments will start emerging.
Miska Kaipiainen
CEO and Founder, Kontena

Read Miska Kaipiainen's blog: Containers Bring Great Opportunity for the Enterprise

29. CAAS - CONTAINERS AS A SERVICE

The rapid expansion of production container deployment in enterprises worldwide has led to a movement toward containers-as-a-service (CaaS) over traditional Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions. Advances in container management tooling are leading operations to embrace CaaS as a solution to enable developers to containerize their legacy applications and then build microservices around them. This trend will rise rapidly in 2017, driven by increased collaboration across IT disciplines and enthusiasm surrounding containerization even at the board level.
David Messina
SVP of Marketing and Community, Docker

Read David Messina's full prediction: CaaS Rises Rapidly in 2017

30. NEW CONTAINER ENGINE EMERGES

My prediction for the state of DevOps in 2017 is that we'll see the introduction of a new, reliable and production-quality container engine that will replace current tools in most production environments.
Miska Kaipiainen
CEO and Founder, Kontena

31. CONTAINER ORCHESTRATION BECOMES KEY CAPABILITY

The importance of container management will grow. Individual containers allow for convenient packaging and delivery of individual executables, in other words, application components. Individual components are useless, however, and only become useful when connected together with other components. This is where a container manager, sometimes called an orchestration framework, increases in importance since the container manager provides a system for running applications overall, not just individual containers. The last few years have undoubtedly seen a trend towards microservices architectures, which is great for agile development, but in some ways sets DevOps teams back in terms of application complexity. It's much easier to manage one big thing with a single set of rules, than it is a 100 small things with multiple rule sets. In 2017 DevOps teams will manage this complexity head on and attempt to figure out which container management tools best solve specific challenges, like security, data management and networking.
Serge Pashenkov
CTO, ClusterHQ

Container orchestration technologies will become the status quo for any serious SaaS application that demands scale. Because microservices are coming into favor, expect the great applications to be built with programmatically accessible APIs before there are elaborate interfaces.
Randy Apuzzo
CEO, Zesty.io

Read Randy Apuzzo's blog: Con-parison 2016: DEFCON vs. Comic-Con

There will be an increased shift away from defining containers directly, and more towards having containers generated automatically where necessary. With increased experience of actually implementing next gen platforms and automatically generating containers, there will be greater focus on enterprise concerns, such as access controls, audit trails and network technologies that can implement "virtual firewalls" at the level of the orchestration tier. We'll also start seeing the first wave of "it's much harder than it looks" cases.
Andrew Phillips
VP of DevOps Strategy, XebiaLabs

See More Predictions from XebiaLabs

Containers shift development power to where it belongs: developers. Likewise, orchestration tools shift production responsibility to where it belongs: DevOps and IT ops. As a result, enterprises can manage and scale containers as part of private and hybrid cloud architectures while overcoming the skills gap barrier that top-down technologies impose.
Avinash Lakshman
CEO and Founder, Hedvig

32. MICROSERVICES DRIVE DEVOPS

In 2017, we expect more customers adopting DevOps in their development processes as they shift their applications towards a microservice-based architecture. With a microservice-based architecture, monitoring must be thought about upfront; thus, it must become seamlessly integrated into their development toolchain.
Randy George
IBM Distinguished Engineer - APM Architecture, IBM

33. NEXT BIG THING: MICROSERVICES SUPPORT

Microservices support becomes the next big thing: Microservices are helping developers to continuously deploy and iterate on existing applications at greater speed than ever before,making them indispensable for any company with its own proprietary application or service. However, since microservices depend on the underlying IT stack, which requires a host of provisioned resources, extensively deploying them in the same manner as the apps they service remains a stumbling block. As a result, 2017 will see more vendors that specialize in supporting the deployment of microservices as a business model similarly to what Docker achieved with containers.
Danial Faizullabhoy
CEO, Cypherpath

34. AUTOMATING THE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

Containers and Microservices adoption are a development and deployment trend that has significant advantages in impacting the way DevOps work. There will be more focus on tools that assist automation of application deployment to production by shorting testing and validation cycles. Connectivity mapping and comparisons between different staging topologies and of course production topologies will become a major requirement.
Zvika Meiseles
CTO, Correlsense

The small, agile software team has never been more empowered as microservices, continuous delivery and cloud platforms rise in prominence and accelerating software development. The bottleneck today isn't hardware, it is people. You can't scale people like you can scale cloud computing. As a result teams will be looking for ways to collaborate better and faster on high value work and less in low value repetitive work. We can expect to see a significant investment in collaboration and automation tools for DevOps practices, where simplistic tasks that require the speed and efficiency of modern computing will be handed over to the "robots" to accomplish. By automating time-consuming, low-value tasks, DevOps teams will be freed up to focus on the most important aspects of their jobs, that which provides the most value: delivering features and solving problems that customers require, with the peak of efficiency and speed to market.
Sean Regan
JIRA Software and Bitbucket Team Lead, Atlassian

35. THE DEMISE OF AUTO-DISCOVERY

Old school monitoring of services through the traditional, patchy auto-discovery "trawl" has been on its way out for a good while now, and we predict that DevOps will continue to hasten its demise. Why discover changes in the IT infrastructure after the fact when you can maintain a baseline and be notified of changes to the infrastructure as they happen? The open APIs of orchestration and provisioning tools can be taken advantage of to simultaneously update IT service dependency maps and CMDBs as they provision systems – in real-time.
Grant Glading
Sales & Marketing Director, Interlink Software

36. THE API ECONOMY

API Economy – The New Business Engine: As more and more applications are created to help communicate, work, purchase and play more efficiently, developers and application providers leveraging application programming interface (API) will become the norm. Many of these tools are large and tie to other parts of an organization like transactions, shipping and warehousing. According to Kristin R. Moyer, VP and distinguished analyst at Gartner, "The API Economy is an enabler for turning business or organizations into a platform." To ensure these combined APIs deploy and function properly application creators will lean more heavily on visibility and testing solutions.
Sven Hammar
Founder and CEO, Apica

Read Sven Hammar's blog: Incredible Opportunities Offered by the API Economy

Over the next year, I expect we will see an acceleration of API-first design approaches, where APIs become the center of how we build software. I see this being driven in part by the emergence of better and more consistent tooling along the entire API design and development chain and lifecycle. We also expect the adoption of the Open API Initiatives OAS format will help stimulate some of that tooling innovation and adoption.
Manfred Bortenschlager
Director, API Market Development, 3scale by Red Hat

Read 2017 DevOps Predictions - Part 5, covering the many facets of DevOps.