
Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2017. Read them in this 9th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Sirish Raghuram, CEO, Platform9
A Year Determined by Developer Preference
Developers are seeking more flexibility than ever in consuming
infrastructure, and their preferences will determine which cloud
technologies rise and fall in the year ahead. The wave of consolidation
that has engulfed the enterprise cloud market over the past year-plus,
as well as the soaring costs that public clouds are locking enterprises
into, has caused businesses to increasingly embrace open source
alternatives.
OpenStack and Kubernetes have become
popular alternatives to proprietary offerings and the associated vendor
lock-in that comes with them. As bickering over rising cloud consumption
bills and vendor-dominated ecosystems persists -- and cost-effective
alternatives like OpenStack, which is projected to be used by every
Fortune 100 firm within the next three years, gain traction -- it's
clear the mega-vendors of the cloud market are feeling the pressure to
be more relevant to developers. In fact, half of Fortune 100 companies
already use OpenStack and nearly one-third of enterprises are now using
open source container technologies.
Today's enterprise
IT leaders are being asked to quickly deliver modern platforms to their
CTOs in the quest for ever more agile development practices - this
growing pressure in the market is causing some exciting technologies
take hold.
Serverless will become a reality
We
will see serverless technologies gain real traction in 2017. Adoption
will be led by the same, forward-looking DevOps communities that have
championed container technologies, like the Kubernetes community did in
2016.
The first use case that will drive adoption in
2017 is bot development. Today, a lot of DevOps automation involves
writing bots that integrate with various systems using webhooks.
Serverless makes this incredibly natural and easy. Another major use
case is making it easier and faster to start using containers without
having to fully learn and understand all the concepts to systems such as
Kubernetes.
With an intuitive experience that abstracts
away the underlying layers of clusters, pods, networks and storage,
serverless presents a developer-friendly consumption paradigm for
containers and Kubernetes. By the time the holidays come around next
year, you will have used a system that is using serverless internally,
and perhaps even write a bot or two!
Hybrid wars will heat up... and boil over
As
major cloud providers vie aggressively for developers' loyalty, the
year ahead will see hybrid wars heat up as each tries to leapfrog the
other in products, services and support. Just as Google's Kubernetes
surpassed Amazon's Elastic Container Service in 2016, Microsoft Azure
will look to do the same to Google Cloud by offering a
developer-friendly public cloud and on-premises hybrid offering. And now
that Microsoft has joined the Linux Foundation, their place in the open
source community has been seeded. I expect Google and Amazon to respond
-- and for the hybrid wars to continue until one vendor establishes
supremacy with developers, once and for all.
Maturation of the container market
There
will be a reality check on valuations for container companies in 2017,
and container orchestrators whose names aren't Kubernetes are in for a
rough surprise. Kubernetes has all of Google's experience inherent in
its design, and is simply the better system - and as Mesosphere and
Docker begin to realize that they can't compete and attempt to pivot to
Kubernetes, their valuations will reflect challenges to their
fundamentals.
In 2017, as enterprises consider
flexibility a top priority, they will refocus on how they cater to the
DevOps teams who are increasingly dictating the future of a cloud
infrastructure market projected to surpass $200 billion in the next six
years. By aligning with the IT professionals on the front lines of
deployment for these technologies, developer-centric infrastructure will
win out in the long run - and frankly, we've already seen it begin to
pull ahead.
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About the Author
Formerly an early engineer at VMware, where he spent over a decade, Sirish believes in the potential for a flexible open source alternative, without vendors' lock-in pricing or OpenStack's configuration headaches. He now leads a company making that alternative a reality.