Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2020. Read them in this 12th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Ariff Kassam, CTO, NuoDB
"Digital Transformation" Is Not Hot, But IT Infrastructure Modernization Is Changing Fast
In 2020 everyone will be tired of the term
"digital transformation" (if they aren't already), and yet organizations will
still be trying their best to make it a reality. While "digital
transformation" heard frequently, it's really just another way of
describing how organizations are modernizing IT infrastructure so they can
scale their services more rapidly and bring new products and services to market
faster. In short, it's all about agility. No matter what you call it, it's more
than a passing trend. It's a critical factor for business survival.
As organizations continue to modernize
applications and improve business agility, many are reviewing their cloud
adoption strategies. Here are my top three predictions for what that will look
like in the year ahead:
1. Microservices and containers will dominate new
development
As organizations increasingly face new customer
demands and competition from more agile startups, many enterprises will
consider re-architecting applications to take advantage of new flexibility and
functionality offered by microservices and containers.
Using microservices containers
helps development teams to:
- accelerate deployment speed and
frequency,
- reduce costs with better server
compute density utilization,
- improve application availability and
flexibility, and
- improve operational efficiency.
I predict that more
organizations will adopt microservices and containers to simplify and
accelerate their application development and deployment. While many companies
have shown interest in containers over the past over the last few years,
adoption has lagged due to lack of both staff expertise and knowledge about deployment
mechanisms. As Kubernetes matures and simplifies container orchestration,
organizations will increasingly make the leap to microservices and containers
to ensure that they stay competitive.
2. Kubernetes adoption will rise for stateful applications
As software developers are pushed to accelerate
the promotion of applications from development to production, many have found
building and deploying stateless applications using Kubernetes for container
orchestration relatively easy. Stateless applications quickly scale out with
increased user demands and are resilient to failures. For more personalized
applications or those that handle business critical data, persistent state is
essential. Unfortunately, the vast majority of applications used by enterprises
require a persistent state. As it turns out, these stateful applications are
harder to fit into the new world of microservices and containers.
Kubernetes automatically distributes running
containers across the cluster and automatically re-balances the distribution of
containers, essentially controlling the life cycle management of container
processes. While that worked well
for stateless applications, it hasn't been smooth sailing for applications that
require state. Luckily, Kubernetes recently added container-native storage solutions to allow the state to be accessible on any node that the
container can be moved to. By employing container-native storage and a database
that can handle multiple processes running at the same time (without any data
loss or consistency issues), organizations will forge ahead with deploying
stateful applications in Kubernetes.
3. Multi-cloud deployment ramps ups
In an always on world, availability is a key
requirement for application success. And yet high-profile outages from major
cloud vendors persist. To combat the risk of data loss and reduce potential
customer impact during such instances, organizations will accelerate adoption
of multi-cloud strategies in 2020.
To meet current requirements for continuous
availability, many industries today rely on on-premises databases with backups
and disaster recovery in a different region in case of emergency. As
organizations increasingly move to cloud deployment, there will be a
corresponding rise in regulations, particularly for technology-centric
industries such as FinTech. Those new regulations will require multi-cloud
deployment models to protect consumers from outages from cloud providers.
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About the Author
Ariff is responsible for
defining and driving NuoDB's product strategy. Kassam brings 20 years of database
and infrastructure experience to NuoDB to help the company achieve its vision
of a distributed database that can manage an organization's most valuable data
while exploiting the emerging benefits of modern infrastructures such as cloud
and containers.
Prior to NuoDB, Ariff held senior leadership positions at
Teradata, xkoto, and Halcyon Monitoring Solutions. Based in Boston, Ariff holds
a B.A. Sc. in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo and a
M. Sc. in Medical Biophysics from the University of Toronto. He is also a
technical patent co-holder for distributed database design and a passionate
technical executive known for his ability to provide proven strategic direction
in the face of rapidly changing business requirements.