Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019. Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Dave McAllister, Evangelist and Community Guy, Scalyr, Inc
FaaS is the new "Black"
During 2018, the technology world reached new peaks with
discussions of orchestration and containers. In 2019, while both these topics
strengthen their hold on the Dev and Ops minds, new (and old) technologies jump
into the spotlight with impact on
developers.
Function-as-a-Service
is the 2019 buzzword.
Serverless, FaaS or whatever you would call it will lead the
marketing buzz parade in 2019. Every vendor will have some sort of FaaS
product, project or use case and many of them will fail to add to the
development and deployment value FaaS brings. During this time FaaS-based
applications start creeping into production from companies who are focused on
real on-demand capability without platform overhead.
Microservices change
to services as small as necessary.
Microservices and the inability to deal with hundreds (or
thousands) of discrete services will change the architectural view for
good. Instead of being as small as
possible, services will become as small as necessary to deliver the correct
functional returns. Developer teams will suddenly discover that design in
services matters as much as design in communications; DevOps will rejoice in
the improved ease of actually getting things to work.
Kubernetes limits
start appearing.
Kubernetes rules the roost on orchestration, but 2019 will
bring significant awareness of the limitations, such as self-monitoring and
unapproachable configurations. These
limits will be loosely addressed via ecosystem adds and extensions.
Furthermore, it will become ever more apparent that the orchestrated
infrastructure itself is inapproachable and that honestly, Kubernetes is not
start-up friendly. Expertise in K8s architecture and ecosystem will be in high
demand and limited supply.
The death of
centralized logging was greatly exaggerated.
Given the scale of modern applications, there is a trend to
say that logging and log search/analytics are dead and that the only thing
needed is events and monitoring. As expressed, there is a fundamental flaw in
pure dependence on metrics, be they timeseries or otherwise. Or to describe the
process, alerts tell you something is wrong, metrics and analytics can help
indicate where something is wrong, but to determine what is wrong usually takes
a dive into log files. Developers and Ops will be reminded that logs are the
ultimate source of truth in production.
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About the Author
Currently running technical
evangelism for Scalyr, Dave McAllister is working with DevOps, developers and
architects to highlight the advantages of modern microservice architectures and
orchestration to solve large-scale distributed systems challenges, especially
for today's fast-moving cycles. Dave has been a champion for open systems and
open source from the early days of Linux to today's world of clouds and
containers. He often speaks on topics such as the real-world issues associated
with emerging software architectures and practices, on open source software and
on creating new technology companies.
Dave was named as one of the top ten pioneers in open source by
Computer Business Review, having cut his teeth on Linux and compilers before
the phrase "open source" was coined.
Well versed in trivia, he
won a Golden Penguin in 2002. Find him on Twitter @dwmcallister or
LInkedin.com/in/davemc