Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019. Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Alexis Richardson, CEO, Weaveworks
Verticalized Serverless Platforms and More
At this year's KubeCon + CloudNativeCon
North America, it was announced that Kubernetes has finally crossed over into
"boring technology". This is not necessarily a bad thing. It means that a new
technology has moved beyond its cutting-edge stage, and that it can be used
safely in production.
In this interview with Alexis Richardson,
CEO of Weaveworks, and Chair of the Technical Oversight Committee for the CNCF,
Alexis answers questions on what technologies you can expect this year, how
they could play out over the upcoming year and why Kubernetes might not yet be
completely boring.
Much has been made of Serverless at Kubecon. Is this the new
technology going forward?
I think that serverless, as we understand
serverless to mean, where it's easy for an application developer to provide
some code for a platform that will run that code, adds a lot value.
In the past, platforms as a service have
been described as having zero to little market and yet an inevitable market
occurred. If you look at companies like Heroku, they've been at it for about 10
years, and although they've been really successful, their platform in the cloud
represents only a tiny minority of Amazon's total workloads.
More recently we're starting to see other
kinds of platforms as a service under the name of serverless like Lambda on
Amazon, which anecdotally seem to be getting a lot of uptake in the market. But
can we tell if they represent a growing portion of Amazon's workloads?
Amazon is on exponential growth, but is Lambda
on an exponential growth path too - relative to Amazon's total growth?
A lot of vendors or customers agree that
the future is a large number of developers who don't need to understand how the
plumbing works. They can simply request services and then deploy it more or
less as it is and let the platform figure out how best to run that service.
What other platforms do you see falling under the serverless
category?
You could imagine a world with 1000s and
1000s of platform idioms or serverless idioms. Machine learning as a service
and many different kinds of machine learning as a services, for example: the
internet of things, drones, cars, and healthcare.
A few weeks ago, someone was talking about
an open source project for manipulating genetics and proteins and other
molecular components. In the future, many of the serverless projects will be
associated with specific areas. I think it will be very, very, very
verticalized and area specific. This creates an atmosphere for a diversity of
platforms. Clearly the scope for that is
huge. Whether it's called serverless or
PaaS or something... the terminology probably needs to change to encompass all
that it will do.
The other thing is the layer on which this
sits is still very much undefined. There
are still changes going on at the infrastructure level and even at the
processor level. For example, you have GPUs from Google and perhaps other types
of processors that still need to be invented.
And continuing on to the next layer up,
what it means to be a container is still being defined and adapting. Cloud
services like Web Assembly, an abstract machine that can run any code, runs as
a Function as a Service with a lamda-esque offering for any C++ code or Java
are similar to lambda layers. These types of services are only in the very
beginning stages of innovation.
And if you keep on going up the stack, there
are new application frameworks like Tensorflow and Kubeflow. So, I think, we're not going to see
innovation shift from the bottom to the top of the stack until the innovations
slow down lower down in the stack.
What is meant when we hear that Kubernetes is now boring technology?
Although people have said that Kubernetes
is now boring, actually it's going to take another five years before we derive
a commonly agreed on platform for functions, abstractions, algorithms, and
other middleware. Once those are truly
settled on and most of the providers are running similar platforms - that's
when you'll see the real explosion of app development tools on top of
Kubernetes.
I think this year, you'll start to see more
of that side of things in the cycle. But ultimately, it's going to take a while
for these technologies to really take hold.
Will we also need to see cultural shifts within the whole
development environment?
That's the other area of developer tooling
that needs to fully change before we embrace serverless technologies. We're
starting to see the start of that with the processes that involve getting code
from a developer's computer to the cloud.
We're seeing joined up stories with Azure
DevOps and GitHub Actions and some other GitHub offerings that are also working
on best way to get your code from the repo onto the cloud with the least amount
of effort. A bit like platform as a service but more Continuous Delivery as a
service. I would say that our own Weave
Flux is a part of that landscape, as well as Skaffold and Draft from Microsoft and lot's of
other GitOps projects coming up in the CNCF like Garden.io.
These are all tools that are affecting
cultural changes around how we do development.
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About the Author
Alexis Richardson, CEO, Weaveworks
Alexis is the co-founder and CEO of Weaveworks. He is also the
chairman of the TOC for CNCF. Previously
he was at Pivotal, as head of products for Spring, RabbitMQ, Redis, Apache
Tomcat and vFabric. Alexis was responsible for resetting the product direction
of Spring and transitioning the vFabric business from VMware. Alexis co-founded
RabbitMQ, and was CEO of the Rabbit company acquired by VMware in 2010, where
he worked on numerous cloud platforms. Rumours persist that he co-founded
several other software companies including Cohesive Networks, after a career as
a prop trader in fixed income derivatives, and a misspent youth studying and
teaching mathematical logic.