Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019. Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Oleg Chunikhin, CTO at Kublr
Kubernetes Becomes a New IaaS+ and Accelerates Adoption of Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Technologies in 2019
2018 was a big year for Kubernetes. It was a year
when Kubernetes went from a container orchestration framework to the container orchestration solution
- a de-facto standard container management platform.
The Kubernetes target audience - IT development and
operations teams - also matured along the path to containers adoption. While
there was always a share of very advanced users, the general IT crowd shifted
from generally learning what containers are and how they can help us, to researching
container orchestration/Kubernetes solutions.
We have even seen some users with "been there, built
that myself, now looking for a stable supported Kubernetes vendor" in their LinkedIn
status. We see these trends continuing as the industry matures, plus here are a
few of our predictions for the next year:
Increase
of multi-cloud and hybrid use-cases: As
companies expand their Kubernetes deployments, they'll start to move away from
cloud specific deployment and monitoring solutions to multi-cloud solutions.
Rise
in Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies adoption: Driven by the agility requirements of DevOps,
multi-cloud/hybrid, and portability, Kubernetes and cloud-native adoption will
experience exponential growth.
Kubernetes
becomes an IaaS+: The perception of
Kubernetes will shift from a tool that merely manages containers to the infrastructure
that abstracts away the differences between multiple environments, becoming your
private IaaS: generic, convenient, flexible, and extensible. It will also
be used as IaaS+ running higher-level services such as cloud-native storage
(e.g. Rook/Ceph), databases (Vitess and others), data science, data lakes, etc.
This trend is powered by the need to support multi-cloud and hybrid
deployments, and by the fact that Kubernetes is not only a great container
orchestration framework, but it also provides a very convenient and flexible
infrastructure abstraction, which is not limited to compute resources, but also
covers storage, specialized computing (GPU, FPGA, etc.), and is flexible enough
to support other types of devices. We would not be surprised if we see support
for quantum computing in Kubernetes soon.
Increase
of in-house cloud-native stack expertise:
As more IT teams adopt Kubernetes or cloud-native/container orchestration
platforms, cloud-native in-house expertise increases, translating into a better
understanding of their actual cloud-native platform requirements.
More
open source application stacks will run natively on Kubernetes: With a surge in Kubernetes adoption, we expect an
ever-increasing number of well-known open source application stacks to be
adapted to natively run in Kubernetes clusters (e.g. Spark, Hadoop, etc.).
Advancements
in cloud-native storage and databases: We
expect to see a continued development and increased maturity in cloud-native
storage and databases, including those that can run on top of Kubernetes
themselves, which would support the portability improvements and
hybrid/multi-cloud deployments trend.
Cloud native application
development and DevOps frameworks and tools: Tools and frameworks that
support development of modern cloud native applications will become more mature
and integrated; this includes microservices and serverless frameworks such as
KNative, FN, Istio; and tools such as Spinnaker.
##
About the Author
Oleg Chunikhin, CTO at Kublr
With 20 years of software architecture and development experience, Kublr CTO
Oleg Chunikhin is responsible for defining Kublr's technology strategy and
standards. He has championed the standardization of DevOps in all Kublr does
and is committed to driving adoption of container technologies and automation.
Oleg holds a Bachelor of Mathematics and a Master of Applied
Mathematics and Computer Science from Novosibirsk State University, and is an
AWS Certified Software Architect.