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.