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.