Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2016. Read them in this 8th Annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Jason English, virtualization author and Galactic Head, Product Marketing, Skytap
2016 The Year of DevOps ICEbergs: The Global Warming
This will be a year of glacial change in application
development, as we finally start seeing some once-thought-permanent fixtures of
our landscape calving off into large, but moveable icebergs. What I'm talking
about is an increased ability to compartmentalize even some monolithic systems
so software delivery can move forward.
Last year I predicted 2015 would be the year of
DevOps on ICE [or "Infrastructure-as-Code-as-Environments" see http://vmblog.com/archive/2014/11/07/skytap-2015-prediction-the-devops-on-ice-tour.aspx#.VmiyLYQ5nB8].
In hindsight this was a bit like forecasting that today we have a 100% chance
of weather. Perhaps my bets were overly safe about enterprises increasingly
leveraging cloud environments for dev/test, as it seems every company has some
investment in cloud in the area of their business reserved for innovation. Same
goes for well-defined IaC approaches like Chef/Puppet deployments, Vagrant and
Ansible configuration - these toolsets are becoming widely used and adopted by
the global software development community.
What's really cool for 2016 is the increased scale of cloud
services. Large enterprise applications are starting to effectively break off
and run in elastic cloud datacenters. To accompany this increased scale, expect
the serious entrance of microservices and containerization approaches like
Docker and Kubernetes as players in the mix. Again, I'm not going too
far out on a limb here - according to the developers and IT execs responding to
our 2015
Software Development Survey, container adoption is expected to rise
from 25% to the same level as IaaS/Cloud usage (47%) in 2016 as the top tool
for the modernization of software development.
The ability to make infrastructure not only
well-defined, but self-contained is going to allow enterprises to start
"unwinding" complex applications and replacing them one component at a time, so
they can run predictably anywhere. There will be some heavy lifting and
rearchitecture involved in getting non-service-ready apps ready for prime-time
in this scenario, and the majority of business logic will still run in standard
on-premises systems, but we'll see several real, referenceable enterprise
examples of this new kind of stack in production this year that go beyond
customer-facing apps and handle serious tasks.
In order to get ahead of this situation I also predict that
at least 2 of the top 5 leading technology vendors will base their growth
strategy on some reference to DevOps plus the above approach, and one of them
will certainly include "-in-a-Box" in the title of their new branding and
development initiative. That's purely speculation but I have only written one
of these predictions so far, and I haven't been wrong yet. Industrialization of
the software lifecycle will continue forward with or without the buy-in of
executives, but technology leaders will make their mark this year by
implementing DevOps strategies across their broader organizations. The vendors
that help their customers componentize and separate application technologies
from the slow-moving glacier of existing business systems to deliver
functionality faster will separate themselves from the pack at the same time.
##
About the Author
Jason English, virtualization author and Galactic Head, Product Marketing, Skytap
