Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019. Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Jesse Stockall, CTO, Embotics
Hybrid IT - A Little Bit of Everything
Today's organizations
are facing a rapidly evolving IT landscape - they're adopting true hybrid and
multi-cloud strategies, embracing the power of DevOps and containerized
applications, and maturing in their use of cloud automation and orchestration
capabilities. That said, 2019 will bring even more changes and challenges for
IT departments.
Here are the four
trends that I predict will impact organizations in the year ahead:
Hybrid Cloud to Multi-Cloud
Hybrid cloud has
evolved in to multi-cloud. With Google's recent efforts around GCP, we have three
top tier public cloud providers to choose from and smart enterprises are not
putting all their eggs in one basket. In 2019 we will see companies develop
true multi-cloud strategies, selecting the appropriate location of their
workloads based on cost, data location and availability of services. We'll also
see increased adoption of technologies that blur the line between on-premises
and public cloud such as VMware on AWS, Azure Stack and the recently released
AWS Outposts.
Avoiding Cloud Lock-in is Hard
For traditional
applications and IaaS, the public clouds all appear to be equal and customers
can migrate from on-premises to a public cloud in a straightforward manner.
Once applications are modernized to take advantage of cloud native features
such as serverless functions, machine learning and advanced databases they
effectively become locked to that cloud provider. While adoption of Kubernetes
and containerized applications will keep the main application itself portal, it
is around the edges that dependencies will creep in and render the application
as a whole tied to a specific provider. As with migration tools, do not expect
innovation in this area to come from the cloud providers themselves as they
have nothing to gain by allowing workloads to migrate away.
Automation & Orchestration
Automation is no
longer a nice-to-have option. It becomes a necessity for teams moving towards
DevOps and is the only way for security and compliance teams to handle the pace
of modern development teams. Those already using automation will continue to
mature, with an evolution from manually executed scripts to zero-touch
orchestrated workflows. Automation is not the job killer that some see it as. It
enables people to focus on higher order tasks and to be proactive instead of just
fighting fires.
Kubernetes
Kubernetes will
continue its meteoric rise and will become mainstream. While it will remain
hard to install from scratch by individuals, the number of high-quality
supported offerings from public cloud providers and enterprise vendors removes
the installation and configuration headache for most users. Containerized
applications will become the norm and are a key tenant of a portable
application that can be deployed across the various infrastructures found in
the hybrid IT environments that will become prevalent in 2019.
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About the Author
Jesse Stockall is the chief technology officer
at Embotics. He has more than 20 years of industry experience leading agile
teams from concept though to delivery and the adoption of software solutions.
He has held previous positions at Symbium, CRYPTOCard, the Canadian government
and Digital Equipment Corp.