Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2016.  Read them in this 8th Annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Robert Treat, CEO of OmniTI

Year of the illumos Cloud

As many predicted last year, 2015 saw an exponential increase in the use of container based systems to provide SOA and microservice based technology implementations. The increased demand can be attributed to the advantages of elastic infrastructure and repeatable environments. These benefits will only continue to grow in 2016.

That said, there are still several hard problems that need to be solved like security and systems analytics. As much of the world has tried to work with sub-par solutions from a mostly Linux based ecosystem, many have looked to other operating systems as a basis for managing these container based architectures. One of the leaders that has emerged is Joyent, with it's Triton Elastic Container Infrastructure, built on top of the open source illumos operating system. As more people look under the hood, they are realizing the advantages of a truly secure container implementation which is unmatched in the Linux space. This coupled with perhaps the best operating system based tracing tool, dtrace, gives operators a world class tool set to manage the new cloud oriented infrastructure that so many business are turning to today.

Whether companies are trying to find solutions for multi-tenancy across clients, or just need departmental differentiation, the problem of secure lightweight Linux containers is really beyond the reach of most users.  Today very few organizations are trying to solve that problem at the source. Rather than hire kernel engineers or wait for vendor based solutions to emerge, 2016 will see more companies transition to illumos as a free, open source system underlying the type of solutions they need to build upon. The hurdles of cross training system operators to a new unix oriented system are not invisible, but they are much lower than the transition from Windows to Linux that many in the industry went through a decade ago.

If there is one thing that the industry's movement towards more decomposable systems has taught us, it's that we need to look at all components of our software stack as replaceable pieces. As the emergence of DevOps continues to push companies towards faster iteration, organizations will find they can no longer wait on their current operating system solutions to re-implement features already available from other sources. While not the only option, illumos is likely the most advanced, and companies would do well to investigate their options before their competition.

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About the Author

Robert Treat is CEO of OmniTI. He is an internationally recognized expert on web operations and has worked with numerous high scale architectures for web, ecommerce, mobile, and social based companies.

As an author, speaker, contributor, and conference organizer, Robert has deep connections in the Postgres, WebOps and DevOps communities, and beyond, extending to a variety of databases, big data, cloud, and open source development communities.