Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2016. Read them in this 8th Annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Stefano Stabellini and Russell Pavlicek, Xen Project Members
Unikernels Pick Up Momentum, ARM Advances, Data Breaches Continue, and then there’s Containers…
2016 marks the seventh year the Xen Project has been a
collaborative project under the Linux Foundation's leadership. The open source
project has more than a decade of development under its belt and is being used
by more than 10 million users. Its focus is to advance virtualization in a
number of different commercial and open source applications from desktop
virtualization to embedded and hardware applications. It is made up of members
from Alibaba, Amazon Web Services, AMD, ARM,
Bromium, Cavium, Citrix, Google, Intel, NetApp, Oracle, Rackspace, and Verizon
Terremark.
Two members of the Xen Project (Stefano
Stabellini and Russell Pavlicek) provide a few
predictions into what they think will happen with cloud computing in 2016 and
beyond.
Q: What are your top three predictions for 2016?
Stabellini: ARM will be available for purchase off the
shelf, security will continue to be an issue, and containers will continue to
pick up momentum, but the technology's acceleration will be at a decline.
Q: How will the advancements of ARM affect the
server hardware industry and do you have any additional predictions in this
space?
Stabellini: As for ARM, ARM servers' advancement will
create diversity in the server hardware ecosystem, which is very much needed at
this point. Anytime you have more diversity in an ecosystem this will help spur
innovations.
In addition to this, I think that one large web 2.0 company will
adopt non-x86 servers at scale in production, but Intel's server market share
won't even budge.
Q: Now onto security, why do you think this will continue to be an
issue in 2016?
Stabellini: As we've seen year-over-year, likely 50+
million accounts will be stolen by a data breach. As for the why, security (as any other feature) has a cost, in terms of software
development, software deployment and lifecycle management. All of these take
time and money, and many companies and individuals don't seem to be willing to
pay that cost. Between convenience and security, convenience is the one that
usually wins.
Q: Why do you think the acceleration of
containers will be at a decline?
Stabellini: Containers are hitting their peak of success
right now, they have reached the top, so acceleration will decrease.
Q: Is there another technology on the rise that might curb the
acceleration of containers or become more popular in 2016?
Pavlicek: Although containers will continue to pick up
momentum, there will be a surge of interest in unikernels, which bundles an
entire software stack (from application code to bare minimum operating system
functions) into a single tiny, secure, agile executable that is suitable for
direct execution as a VM.
Q: Why will unikernels pick up more momentum in 2016?
Pavlicek: Similar to containers, they create workloads that are lightweight
and agile; perfect for the new needs of the cloud. Unlike containers, they have
a smaller attack surface making them more secure. Due to the secure nature of
unikernels, you will see more and more enterprises seriously evaluating
unikernels in 2016, with an adoption curve which will rapidly escalate in 2017.
Q: As companies try to scale with containers will security
concerns increase with this technology?
Hypervisor-driven
virtual machines have a distinct security advantage over containers. Container
providers are working hard to improve security, but it is yet to be determined
if users will spend the additional time to follow the recommended guidelines. Unikernels,
on the other hand, have enhanced security baked in. The status quo for security
in the cloud needs to be raised significantly, and
unikernels will help make that happen through an inherently security-minded
architecture.
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About the Authors
- Stefano
Stabellini is technical director for the Xen Project activities at Citrix
- Russell
Pavlicek is a Xen Project Evangelist and
Senior Project Manager at Citrix