Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2020. Read them in this 12th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Niraj Tolia, CEO and Co-Founder at Kasten
2020 will see Kubernetes continuing to dominate, proliferate and run everywhere
Data and application management are at the core of IT
responsibilities in any organization, so we can always expect continued
innovation around the management of business applications and data. In the current climate that innovation will
center around cloud-native as well, and following are a few of what we at
Kasten feel will be the most impactful predictions for the coming year:
- Serverless
will not take off in 2020
- Serverless
is still relatively new; its not mature enough for large applications, lacks a
vibrant tooling ecosystem around it, and doesn't have established best
practices. While the community is making great progress and we will see some
successful deployments, we will not see widespread or accelerating production
usage in 2020.
- Expect to
see more Kubernetes failure case studies - but have faith in the benefits this
will bring!
- As more
Kubernetes enters production, we will see more public failure stories. However,
this is a good thing and a critical part of the cloud-native community's
culture. This sharing will allow Kubernetes to mature faster than any other
technology, and operators to get more confidence in their systems.
- Continued acceleration
for stateful cloud-native applications
- While all
data points have shown the increasing adoption of stateful cloud-native
applications with traditional relational (e.g., MySQL and PostgreSQL) and NoSQL
systems (e.g., MongoDB), 2020 will be different when measured in terms of
specialization (e.g., deep-learning frameworks with deep Kubernetes hooks), scale
(e.g., scale-out databases such as Vitess), and multi-cloud data movement and
portability (e.g., test-dev and DR workflows from Kasten).
- Rise of
multi-cloud applications
- 2020 will
show the rise of applications that will be simultaneously running in multiple
public and on-prem environments. While only a few of them will truly stretch
across multiple clouds, the common infrastructure layer provided by platforms
such as OpenShift and Kubernetes will make it easy for developers and operators
to truly provide choice to their end customers.
- Day 2
Transition for Cloud-Native
- We will see
consolidation in companies providing "day 1" cloud-native solutions (Kubernetes
distributions, management planes, etc.) and an increased focus on "day 2"
platforms and tools (data management, security, observability). In particular, security and data loss will continue to be
an issue, making backup and recovery an even more important initiative for
enterprises.
- Rise of the
Portable Storage Application
- One of
the most impactful predictions we expect to see in the coming year is the rise
of portable stateful applications. With the growth of Kubernetes enabling
portability for stateless apps by providing for common infrastructures across
organizations, we expect to see developers realize fairly quickly how to
capitalize on portability for stateful apps as well.
We have seen a great deal of innovation over the last year
in all facets of technology, and not surprisingly, with a significant focus
around data management. We feel that in
the coming year the vendor community will continue to look at making
improvements in the data management space with particular focus on the security
of data, backup and recovery, and application portability.
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About the Author
Niraj Tolia is the
CEO and Co-Founder at Kasten and is interested in all things Kubernetes.
He has played multiple roles in the past including the Senior Director of
Engineering for Dell EMC's CloudBoost family of products and the VP of
Engineering and Chief Architect at Maginatics (acquired by EMC). Niraj
received his PhD, MS, and BS in Computer Engineering at Cargenie Mellon
University.