Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019. Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Stephan Fabel, Director of Product Management at Canonical
The Continued Evolution of the Cloud
Leading
Public Cloud Providers will Differentiate
I believe in some ways 2019 will be business as
usual for the major public cloud providers. Their IaaS model is
well-entrenched, and any new technology which drives CPU and RAM consumption on
their platforms will be more than welcome.
However, with multi-cloud quickly becoming the
norm, the major players will have to prove their worth more than ever before in
an enterprise's IT strategy. Price wars between the leaders have proven to
result in a race to the bottom, so instead they're looking to differentiate.
Expect to see Google focus on its AI credentials, Microsoft on its workload
migration capabilities, and Amazon to continue pushing AWS hard in the public
sector space.
This differentiation will be important for the
incumbents as it could be the year they come under increasing pressure from
other public cloud players. IBM's acquisition of Red Hat is a signal of
potential competition, while eastern players such as Alibaba and Tencent
continue to improve their capabilities locally, undoubtedly with an eye on
international expansion.
Cloud
Strategies Will be Multi-Cloud by Default
Multi-cloud strategies reached new levels of
adoption last year, with Virtustream finding 86% of enterprises to be taking
such an approach. But, despite considerable uptake already, we expect
multi-cloud's prominence to grow further still in 2019. Multi-cloud is almost
becoming the default cloud strategy as organizations look to avoid vendor
lock-in, granting themselves greater flexibility in deploying the most relevant
cloud across different departments and functions.
While such an approach offers the added bonus of
improving ROI, it is the increased performance and autonomy which are most
appealing to enterprises. Instead of being restricted to the ecosystem of one
vendor, a multi-cloud approach permits organizations to deploy a mixture of
cloud apps to suit their needs across the business, while at the same time
technologies such as Kubernetes can be used to containerise and deploy applications
across different cloud providers when necessary.
Shifting
from Automation to AI in the Cloud
The increasing size and complexity of cloud
deployments means that the old habit of not caring about where and how the
cloud runs until you have to is dying. Instead, there has been a widespread
shift to the automation of monitoring, resource allocation, and troubleshooting
within the cloud.
Upscaling this automation of processes into true
AI which can adapt is the next step, and one which we'll see in 2019 arising
out of necessity due to the fluid nature of cloud usage. The rise of
multi-cloud, alongside a fear of vendor lock-in, has resulted in cloud
strategies not being as static as they once were - meaning non-adaptable
automation of processes isn't sustainable in the long run.
Concepts such as auto-healing are of undeniable
value to any cloud team but, without truly adaptable AI, it will be
increasingly difficult for them to succeed and keep up within the shifting
complexity of the cloud landscape.
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Stephan
Fabel is Director of Product Management at Canonical
