Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2020. Read them in this 12th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Ben Sigelman, Daniel Spoonhower and Ben Cronin of LightStep
Emerging Technologies and New Technical Concepts will Introduce New Challenges and Opportunities in 2020
The software industry continues to
evolve as new technologies enter the ecosystem, becoming more complex and
growing at a faster rate than ever before. With these industry changes comes an
increased opportunity to better understand existing technology and any related
challenges introduced that haven't broken into the mainstream yet - such as
observability or deep systems. In 2020, expect these technical concepts to
become more ingrained not only in the minds of developers building complex
programs but also in the larger tech community. This proliferation of new
technology will also lead to the democratization of new cloud architectures and
an opportunity to define new industry-standard best practices in software
development.
Ben Sigelman, CEO and Co-founder,
LightStep, predicts:
In 2020, more enterprises will
realize they have "deep systems": for many years now, we've been
talking about the migration to the cloud, microservices, serverless computing,
Kubernetes, and the rest of it. This transformation has been challenging, both
technically and organizationally. The deeper the system - that is, the higher
the number of independently-managed layers in the entire production system -
the more challenging it will be to build and operate. For this reason,
understanding deep systems is of great interest to any organization moving to
cloud-native architectures, at scale: what works well in a small system will
not work well in a deep system. Systems grow ever deeper as the modern
enterprise invests in technological differentiation, and our toolchain must
evolve if we wish to accelerate - rather than impede - that critical
transformation.
In 2020, we will (finally)
understand what observability is *for*. 2019 was a
breakout year for "observability" as a term, but most of our industry still
doesn't know why they need it or how to develop a strategy around it. In 2020,
we'll hear more about how high-quality observability enables more frequent
releases, a faster end-user app experience, reduced downtime, and other
critical product and engineering objectives. At the same time, we will stop
confusing high-quality observability with high-quality telemetry: in 2020, the
CNCF's OpenTelemetry project will both standardize and automate the collection
of traces, metrics, and logs, moving our evaluation of effective observability
beyond the bits and bytes of the raw data, and instead towards the real-world
use cases that actually drive business value for the enterprise.
Daniel Spoonhower, CTO and
Co-founder, LightStep predicts:
Multi-cloud and especially
multi-vendor and hybrid cloud will become the new norm in 2020. This is in
part because they mitigate the risks of vendor-induced or region-wide outages,
but also in part because vendor-specific cloud solutions - especially advanced
storage systems - continue to offer more functionality and better performance.
Buyers will be willing to tolerate partial vendor lock-in to get the benefits
of these solutions, but of course no one vendor will offer everything an
organization needs. Multi-cloud is also a result of engineering teams gaining
greater independence and autonomy within their organizations: different teams
will choose different platforms, including different cloud providers. This will
further accelerate the DevOps transformation, as each team will need to build
the expertise required to leverage their infrastructure. Finally, the adoption
of multi-cloud is another indicator of increasing tolerance for deep systems:
organizations are willing to leverage more and more technology as part of their
tech stacks to drive faster developer velocity - even at the cost of making the
operation of those systems more complex.
Ben Cronin, COO and Co-founder,
LightStep predicts:
In 2020, we're going to see new
industry-standard best practices start to emerge in production software
development. Over the past years, we've seen drastic transformations in how
people deploy software. What were once DevOps workflows are truly becoming
general software engineering workflows. Containers are now entirely mainstream
and the rising tide of supporting technologies (if you look at Kubernetes as
the foremost example) has reached a level of maturity where the conversation is
not about if or will these technologies give organizations an advantage but
rather how people can best use them to accelerate development velocity and
increase business value across the company.
Next year, I anticipate the
term DevOps is going to start heading in a decline. You'll see all engineering
leaders looking for ways to apply organizational practices and technical
standards, once driven by dedicated IT or DevOps teams, across entire software
engineering organizations to get companies onto effective, modern development
and deployment processes. It's going to be an exciting year where there'll be a
lot of competition to define the "right" way to do everything from observability
to CI/CD to security in mainstream software development.
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