Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019. Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Joe Hanson,
technology writer, PubNub
Digital Transformation Gets Micro, Edgy, and Instant
Making predictions is always a little iffy - if you stay in
the safe zone, you're not saying anything interesting, and if you stretch a bit
too far, someone might poke fun at your expense. But there's one thing we can
say for sure as we race down the remaining slope of 2018 and build up momentum
to take on another super sized year - digital transformation will continue
apace. And we do mean fast, as in barely time to catch your breath. So as the end of the year brings holidays and
pockets of respite, take the time to clear your mind and envision where you
want to go with innovations in application and service delivery, IoT, and
enabling infrastructure.
We offer a few insights to help shape and inspire
transformative thinking and doing in the year ahead.
2019 will be the year
of edge computing.
We need to push computing to the
edge to cope with the massive growth of devices (IoT, mobile, etc.) and the
data they're streaming and generating - not to mention the explosion of data
stream-based apps (think Uber, Gojek, WhatsApp, Climate Corp). We need new
computing infrastructure that lives beyond the centralized datacenter. More
advanced computation is required, and pushing it to external servers is
increasingly expensive and wasteful. Traditional web infrastructure, of course,
cannot handle these new requirements.
Edge computing addresses these
challenges because logic can be executed on devices (i.e., closer to the edge,
or at the edge). Benefits of moving compute closer to the edge include:
- Lower
bandwidth consumption: You're sending the minimum required to external
servers.
- Faster
performance: You're not waiting to send/receive processed data. It's
immediate.
- It's more
secure: The more outward connections you open up, the more security
vulnerabilities.
- Scalability:
As new devices are added and removed, most of the burden is on the edge
devices, so you don't have to keep adding data center capacity to accommodate
growth.
2019
will be the year of microservices
Microservices are a major factor
in the move from monolithic to distributed application design, the beating
heart of digital transformation. Decoupled and only responsible for discrete
tasks, microservices allow teams to build more scalable and extensible
applications, more quickly. Microservices enable an array of benefits, and I'm
sure we'll discover more in the year ahead.
From a reliability standpoint, a key benefit of
microservices is that failure of a single service doesn't impact the other
services. Fault isolation means your mobile app itself is more resilient. For
example, if your push notifications service has an outage, the rest of your
application will continue to operate normally, and you could easily fall back
to a different push notification service as needed.
Microservices are also highly receptive to playing nicely
with third-party services. In building mobile apps, developers often don't have
time (or, in some cases, the expertise) to build every feature and function
from scratch, and instead choose to integrate best-in-class services that are
more reliable and trustworthy.
In the year ahead, leverage the power of microservices to help
you quickly and confidently secure, feature-rich apps that incorporate
artificial intelligence and other complex technologies.
2019
will be the year of instant gratification
We want it,
and we want it ten minutes ago. We want it with no friction, no barriers, and
most importantly, without talking to a human. If we don't get it, we are
perturbed. We've been conditioned to loathe waiting, especially for digital
services, and the impatience has crept into our daily life.
Across every
vertical and industry, businesses are pivoting towards instant gratification, and
the art of delivering data, product, or experience when the user demands it.
The masses are armed with smartphones and applications. This
handheld accessibility to technology has made the on-demand economy integral to
how we operate on a daily basis. You can have somebody else do anything for you
with the push of a button - your laundry, your grocery shopping, your child's
ride to soccer practice, your dog's walk to the park. Across the globe, the
on-demand economy has revolutionized urban centers and rural areas alike. And
it's growing rapidly as new apps flood the market to solve problems, both
minuscule and mission critical.
Of course, instant gratification as a business principle transcends
the delivery of goods and services. Enabling on-demand information,
experiences, and human-machine interactions in the real world opens up a whole
new realm of possibilities.
The Internet of Things promises the instantaneous delivery
of data from devices to other devices or end users. You can know immediately if
your door is locked, your sprinklers are leaking, or your baby is crying. In a nutshell, innovating and
perfecting the dynamic of instant gratification is going to be key to business
success.
This all thrilling, but we can't skip over the fundamentals.
This kind of computing - at the edge, in real time, distributed, and agile-
requires the right launch pad. Spend the time that's left in this year to
assess and strategize your infrastructure and application needs, so you can be
ready to take off at top speed in 2019.
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About the Author
Joe Hanson is a technology writer at PubNub. He's been
published in ProgrammableWeb, The Next Web, The New Stack, Hacker Noon, and
freeCodeCamp.