Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2020. Read them in this 12th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Frank Jablonski, VP of Global
Marketing at SIOS Technology
Cloud-native Development Efforts Will Become Pervasive Across the Industry - From Enterprises to Vendors
As the cloud continues on its inexorable track to IT
dominance, 2020 will witness players from all across the IT industry
accelerating their cloud-native development efforts. That includes the cloud
service providers and their enterprise customers, of course, but also
application and system software vendors, as well as system integrators.
Enterprise DevOps teams will seek to take full advantage of
the cloud's agility by re-architecting their application/technology stacks
specifically for the cloud environment. IT departments regularly use a "lift
and shift" approach to migrating applications to the cloud, but owing to some
differences between private and public infrastructures, the effort still
requires some changes to ensure meeting desired service levels. After the
initial wave of migration is complete, DevOps will drive re-architecting their
application/technology stacks to a cloud-native implementation to take further
advantage of the cloud's greater efficiency, reliability, scalability and
affordability.
Application and system software vendors will endeavor to
deliver greater value and higher reliability by integrating robust high
availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) features into their solutions.
Most applications today require the customer to provide these protections
separately, and most enterprises do this for all their applications with a
general-purpose HA/DR solution. A high priority for integrating HA/DR features
will be eliminating limitations, such as the dependency Windows Server Failover
Clustering (WSFC) has on shared storage, which is not available in the cloud.
Microsoft addressed this limitation with Storage Spaces Direct, but S2D works
only in a single datacenter, and not across availability zones, making it
unsuitable for truly mission-critical applications.
Once robust HA and/or DR are built into an application as
standard features, customers will be able to simply deploy it on any platform
in a private, purely public or hybrid cloud environment. This will be
especially beneficial for smaller organizations that normally lack the
expertise or resources needed to implement and operate configurations capable
of eliminating all single points of failure. For cloud-native implementations,
the application vendor will want to take full advantage of the resiliency
afforded by the cloud's multiple availability zones and regions.
As the platforms offered by cloud service providers (CSPs) have
matured and become increasingly resilient, the cloud has become suitable for
hosting even the most mission-critical of applications. This ongoing evolution
will witness the advent of Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) offerings, as well as
the hosting of complete suites, such as SAP, that span virtually all of an
organization's departments and all of its business functions. This change will
put greater focus on the reliability, availability and performance, and make
the cloud more strategically important to the enterprise.
The relentless migration of enterprise applications to the
cloud will motivate vendors of purpose-built HA/DR solutions to enhance their
offerings, as well. These solutions already overcome significant limitations,
such as WSFC's dependency on shared storage. They also make it viable to use
Linux for mission-critical applications by eliminating the need for enterprises
to struggle with open source HA software. These enhancements, some based on
advanced technologies like machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence
(AI), will result in HA/DR provisions being more affordable for more
applications running in private, public and hybrid cloud environments.
The other players will also be looking for ways to utilize
ML and AI to deliver more efficient and effective resource management. Achieving
this will require monitoring the environment or applications 24x365 to
understand when they need more resources, and then automatically scaling up
those resources to meet the increased demand. Conversely, the technology will
need to understand when specific resources are no longer needed and safely release
them to minimize costs. Today such dynamic resource allocation can be
unreliable or requires using an inefficient manual process, forcing cloud
customers to either spend more than necessary or fall short of meeting service
levels during periods of peak demand.
Last but not least are the systems integrators, who will
also want to take advantage of the opportunity afforded by migration to the
cloud. There is a window of opportunity opening as enterprises seek more robust
HA/DR solutions that have yet to be fully integrated into the application and
system software. For Linux, some integrators may have the expertise needed to
leverage open source HA software. But an increasing percentage will choose to
integrate solutions purpose-built to provide HA and DR protections for both
Linux and Windows Server, as these have proven to be more dependable for the
customer, while also being just as (if not more) profitable for the integrator.
These industry-wide advances can be expected to make 2020 be
remembered as "The Year the Cloud Went Native."
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About the Author
Frank
Jablonski is VP of Global Marketing at SIOS
Technology, where leads
marketing and communications activities worldwide. His career spans more than 20
years and includes driving worldwide go-to-market development and execution in
senior leadership positions at Acronis, Syncsort, CA, FilesX, Genuity and EMC. Frank
holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from the
University of Massachusetts Lowell.