Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2018. Read them in this 10th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Boris Renski, Co-Founder and CMO, Mirantis
Containers will Drive Massive Shift in How Companies do Business
As tempting as it is to think that technology, and especially cloud technology, has been moving really fast for the past few years, this past year has seen some pretty massive changes that are going to pay off in 2018. Specifically, the move to containers will enable some massive shifts in how companies do business, and the open source community in general, which becomes so much more important, will see a major new organizational model come into play.
Intelligent Delivery will become a thing
Last year containers came into their own as a viable option for developers, but using them well still wasn't completely understood. This year, containerization is turning the immutable infrastructure pattern into a de-facto standard way for managing the lifecycle of applications.
With immutable infrastructure becoming better understood, tooling for blue/green and canary deployment management is gaining popularity. These tools, which enable deployment of a new application to portions of an infrastructure at a time in order to ensure reliability, have been exploding. Whereas Continuous Delivery (CD) used to consist mostly of Jenkins, we now have new entries such as Spinnaker, Harness, and Codefresh. These tools make it possible to create complex pipelines, giving you more control over exactly how your application is deployed.
Next year, coupling CD with monitoring to drive intelligence for automating canary deployments will emerge as the new category, known as Intelligent Delivery. Intelligent Delivery will provide all of the advantages of regular CD, but with the added advantages of workload optimization.
Containerizing VNFs will become a thing
The telco space is big on standards. Nobody moves until everybody moves. So while the benefits of containerizing VNFs (vs. virtualizing network functions) are broadly understood and accepted, the space has been nascent while companies waited for standards to appear.
This year, Kubernetes and its surrounding ecosystem of open projects have provided the telco sector that security. Kubernetes is the orchestrator, Helm is the Kubernetes Package Manager, and with those areas no longer in flux, next year we'll see VNF vendors and telcos starting to move on containerization.
We've already seen the beginning of this process this year with the AT&T announcement about containerizing OpenStack, but that's the NFV Infrastructure level; the really exciting stuff will be happening at the VNF level next year, starting with containerization of vIMS and video delivery (transcoding, packaging etc.).
The OpenStack Foundation will emerge as a credible alternative to the Linux foundation
Since its inception, the OpenStack Foundation has focused on OpenStack related projects, but now that OpenStack itself is fairly stable, the Foundation will turn its skills and resources towards domiciling open source innovation beyond OpenStack itself.
The OpenStack Foundation team, backed by $10M+ of annual corporate funding, has an unmatched track record of building mindshare around open source projects. Consider the fact that although they entered the market late, they destroyed the competition in the open source private cloud space, including Eucalyptus, CloudStack, and OpenNebula, in a matter of months, turning OpenStack into the de facto private cloud standard.
In fact, I would argue that OpenStack foundation team and their push were the catalyst for the 2015 open source VC gold rush that saw over a billion dollars of capital investment in a single year.
The opening of the OpenStack Foundation to non-OpenStack projects presents the opportunity of a lifetime for startups innovating in open source. The OpenStack Foundation team, armed with their deep pocketed marketing war chest, is a huge and undervalued asset; the first few non-OpenStack projects that partner with the OpenStack foundation will get 100% of the attention of the most experienced community builders in the world.
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About the Author
Boris Renski, Co-Founder and CMO
Boris is responsible for helping define Mirantis' strategic vision and executing on it in the marketplace across the OpenStack ecosystem and beyond. Boris's influence was instrumental in Mirantis' current focus on OpenStack. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the OpenStack Foundation.
During the last 15 years, Boris held several executive positions with the companies he helped establish. He was a founder and CEO of Selectosa Systems-an IT consulting company that was subsequently acquired in 2006-and a co-founder and angel investor at AGroup-now a venture backed enterprise software company headquartered in Europe.
Boris holds a BSc in Information Systems from Santa Clara University. He likes technical scuba diving, motorcycles, and RC helicopters.