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 7, covers the Cloud.

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

TREND TO CLOUD-NATIVE CONTINUES

In 2019, the digital transformation trend continues the transition to cloud-native. We're seeing the transition of applications from monolithic to modular, or micro services. Many of these applications still store data via file-based interfaces, but the transition to RESTful-based is accelerating. When the transition happens, it will help to simplify data management and reduce application code at scale. Solutions will need both native file and object interfaces to handle the transition from traditional monolith to the new architectures of modular/micro services under one platform. We see digital transformation and cloud native application deployments growing at 10 times the rate of traditional applications. Amidst this transitional growth, driving down cost and complexity are key success criteria.
Giorgio Regni
CTO, Scality

MOVING BETWEEN DATA CENTER AND CLOUD

In 2019, it will be critically important that application owners be empowered to easily move their applications and the underlying data between data centers and public clouds. For example, when graduating an application from test/dev to production, innovative IT departments will increasingly adopt solutions that can quickly and easily clone the applications and convert backup data into a virtual machine for production in the cloud. This will help realize the enormous potential of hybrid cloud infrastructures that optimize IT costs and scalability.
Rawlinson Rivera
CTO, Cohesity

KUBERNETES SUPPORTS MULTI-CLOUD

Kubernetes will contribute to increased multi-cloud adoption: More organizations are adopting containers so their software can be migrated quickly and reliably between computing environments. Containerization at scale is possible through orchestration tools, led by Kubernetes, an open source tool known for its robustness in deploying and managing container-based applications. Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services recently began offering Kubernetes services, making it easier for organizations to deploy their applications across multiple cloud platforms and implement multi-cloud strategies. In fact, our research through Cloud Catalog confirms this, showing an increase in job postings that mention Kubernetes alongside AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
Stefano Bellasio
CEO, Cloud Academy

KUBERNETES ENABLES CLOUD-NATIVE

Kubernetes becomes the #1 enabler of cloud-native transformation: As organizations strive to accelerate and scale their application development and releases they are increasingly turning Kubernetes to enable their cloud-native applications and to modernize their IT infrastructure. Kubernetes is the most transformational cloud technology today and in 2019 it'll become the operating system for cloud-native applications. Kubernetes — with its built-in high availability, granular infinite scalability, portability, rolling upgrades, and more — provides many of the features that are criticall for running cloud-native applications on a truly composable, interoperable, infrastructure. Enterprises of all sizes would bet on Kubernetes to transform their applications and infrastructure — for both greenfield appplications, as well as for re-architecting and modernizing legacy applications to be Kubernetes-based.
Sirish Raghuram
CEO, Platform9

AUTOMATED INFRASTRUCTURE

The demand for highly simplified IT services will drive continued abstraction of IT resources and the commoditization of data services. Remember when car ads began boasting that your first tune up would be at 100,000 miles? (Well, it eventually became sort of true.) Point is, hardly anyone's spending weekends changing their own oil or spark plugs or adjusting their own timing belts anymore. You turn on the car, it runs. You don't have to think about it until you get a message saying something needs attention. Pretty simple. The same expectations are developing for IT infrastructure, starting with storage and data management: developers don't want to think about it, they just want it to work. "Automagically," please. Especially with containerization and "server-less" technologies, the continuous trend toward abstraction of individual systems and services will drive IT architects to design for data and data processing and to build hybrid, multi-cloud data fabrics rather than data centers. With the application of predictive technologies and diagnostics, decision makers will rely more and more on extremely robust yet "invisible" data services that deliver data when and where it's needed, wherever it lives. These capabilities will also automate the brokerage of infrastructure services as dynamic commodities and the shuttling of containers and workloads to and from the most efficient service provider solutions for the job.
Atish Gude
Chief Strategy Officer, NetApp

QUICK START TEMPLATES

Quick-start templates will become the standard for complex software and service deployments in private, public and hybrid clouds. These templates are wizard-based interfaces that employ automated scripts to dynamically provision, configure and orchestrate the resources and services needed to run specific applications. Among their key benefits are reduced training requirements, improved speed and accuracy, and the ability to minimize or even eliminate human error as a major source of problems. By making deployments more turnkey, quick-start templates will substantially decrease the time and effort it takes for DevOps staff to setup, test and roll out dependable configurations.
Jerry Melnick
President & CEO, SIOS Technology

CLOUD COST CALCULATIONS

Clearing the Cloud Cost Conundrum: Cost calculations across hybrid environments affecting business agility in the CICD pipeline will continue to drive efficiency in the DevOps process.
Jeanne Morain
Author and Strategist, iSpeak Cloud

CLOUD WASTE MANAGEMENT

Cloud management and control is going to be important. Before, it was "move to the cloud at all costs." In 2019, the "at all costs" part will go away, and cloud waste management will become more important.
Lee Atchison
Senior Director, Strategic Architecture, New Relic

SERVERLESS MOVES FROM HYPE TO ADOPTION

Serverless will move beyond the hype as developers take hold: 2018 was all about understanding what serverless is, but as more developers learn the benefits and begin testing in serverless environments, more tools will be created to allow them to take full advantage of the architecture and to leverage functions-as-a-service. Serverless will create new application ecosystems where startups can thrive off the low-cost architecture and creatively solve deployment challenges.
Laurent Bride
CTO, Talend

Serverless becomes less mysterious. Today, every CIO and CTO are evaluating serverless technologies, but a big constraint preventing adoption is the potential for vendor lock-in and unknown variables. In 2019, the mystery around serverless will slowly lift – and in the process, bring it to broader adoption. Today, serverless can lead to lock-in with certain cloud implementations, but we're likely to see an emerging ecosystem of supporting technologies develop as microservices lay the foundation for a new type of cloud operating system.
Ravi Mayuram
SVP of Engineering and CTO, Couchbase

SERVERLESS STILL IMMATURE

More people will think about serverless, and more people will again realize that the tooling around serverless platforms is still immature. I expect that some initiatives will start to show up regarding the governance (hopefully in an integrated development environment (IDE)-style) of multiple functions and connectors in serverless applications.
Edson Yanaga
Director, Developer Experience, Red Hat

SERVERLESS GROWS, KUBERNETES SLOWS

Serverless is going to move into the mainstream, attracting two distinct groups of people: those who need computing beyond what containers can currently provide and those who don't want the overhead of containerization. We saw this trend begin in 2018, in which AWS Lambda adoption grew from 24 percent in 2017 to 29 percent in 2018. And we expect that number to spike in 2019. Containerization is near the top of its hype cycle and will soon race down into the proverbial trough of disillusionment. Kubernetes is not enough on its own, but will continue to see steady growth due to its media attention and the number of services that provide managed or native K8s. That said, we can expect to see an inevitable loss of enthusiasm as more organizations trend toward serverless options moving forward.
Ben Newton
Principal Product Manager, Sumo Logic

SERVERLESS MODERNIZES LEGACY APPS

Serverless will emerge as a key pattern for modernizing legacy applications: Advances in open source technologies that allow organizations to run Serverless applications reliably not just on public clouds, but also on their own existing infrastructure, greatly increase the adoption of Serverless across large enterprises. Being able to benefit from the speed, cost savings and improved utilization of serverless while leveraging their own datacenters, along with the ability to port serverless apps between cloud providers, all make serverless a compelling pattern for enterprises. Large organizations would flock to serverless more and more, not just to accelerate development of new cloud-native applications, but as a compelling pattern for modernizing brownfield, legacy apps. Serverless will become the go-to "strangler" pattern for modernizing monolithic, legacy code base. Common use cases and key functionality that lend themselves well for easy decomposition to serverless functions would be the standard path to modernizing legacy apps. Serverless frameworks would act as proxy in fronting legacy applications with a modern RESTful API. Functions can intake data in any format and convert it to a target legacy system to process the response. Functions can also translate messages sent back to the consuming applications via the API Gateway.
Sirish Raghuram
CEO, Platform9

APPLICATION DELIVERY CONTROLLERS

DevOps teams are realizing there is a greater need than ever before for agility and flexibility, as they contend with the increasing cost of cloud. The ability to move applications (and their associated databases, application delivery controllers and more) to any environment — and often run them in multi-cloud environments — is becoming a top priority for them. Pure software solutions, like the ones being introduced in the ADC market, allow an unlimited amount of flexibility, and in 2019 we expect to see more DevOps teams utilizing these new software-based ADCs to ensure the security and protection of mission-critical applications while meeting the requirements of becoming agile and scalable and at the same time maintaining lower operational costs.
Dave Blakey
Co-Founder and CEO, Snapt

Read 2019 DevOps Predictions - Part 8, covering microservices and containers.