Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2017. Read them in this 9th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Shannon Williams, co-founder of Rancher Labs
Rapid Adoption and Innovation to Come
Rapid adoption of
container orchestration frameworks
As more companies
use containers in production, adoption of orchestration frameworks like
Kubernetes, Mesos, Cattle and Docker Swarm will increase as well. These
projects have evolved quickly in terms of stability, community and partner
ecosystem, and will act as necessary and enabling technologies for enterprises
using containers more widely in production.
Greater innovation
in container infrastructure services
Though there's a strong set of container storage and networking
solutions on the market today, more products will emerge to support the growth
and scale of production container workloads, particularly as specifications
like Container Network Interface (used by Kubernetes) continue to mature.
Companies like StorageOS, Portworx and Quobyte will see more adoption.
Infrastructure
clusters as code emerges
To reinforce the
ability to write once and run anywhere, orchestration clusters will be
increasingly templated and instantiated from blueprints, in the same way
containerized apps are deployed as Docker Compose files. Users will define
exactly the Kubernetes, Swarm or Mesos deployment configuration they need,
along with any infrastructure services, and then deploy it on whatever cloud or
virtualization infrastructure they choose. Users have been asking for this
function for over a year, and the latest version of Rancher takes steps towards
this vision by enabling users to deliver complete, container-ready environments
as modular, customizable templates.
Docker
accelerates ARM server adoption
We are likely still
a ways from the real "year of the ARM server," but containers will definitely
help accelerate adoption of ARM in the datacenter. Containers run the
same on ARM servers as they do on Intel servers, but with the potential to
dramatically reduce costs. Hosting companies like Packet are now offering ARM
servers on demand in hourly increments; containers and thin Linux distributions
like RancherOS make it possible to take advantage of these hosting solutions,
in turn making ARM servers an interesting option for certain workloads.
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About the Author
Shannon Williams is a co-founder and Vice President of Sales and
Marketing at Rancher Labs. Prior to starting Rancher, Shannon was Vice
President of Market Development at Citrix Systems, after the company acquired
Cloud.com, where he led worldwide sales. He has more than 15 years of
experience in developing emerging technology and has held management positions
at technology companies such as Solidcore Systems (acquired by McAfee), Teros
(acquired by Citrix) and Securant Technologies (acquired by RSA). Shannon is a
graduate of Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
