By Emile Vauge, CEO and co-founder at Containous

Microservices Networking Standardizes and Tooling Gets More Comprehensive

Expect a big year in networking for microservices as standardization, simplicity, and consolidation emerge as particularly noticeable (and welcome) trends. We'll see real growth in the capabilities of cloud-native tooling offered, while also seeing the ecosystem as a whole move away from siloed (and relatively inefficient) functions and toward a more holistic future.

A few specific predictions for 2020:

1: Enterprises turn to internal standardization to get more out of their cloud-native networking architecture.

Today, most cloud-native networking architectures are put together on an ad hoc project basis, as opposed to businesses - at all sizes - having consistent systems and standards in place. However, I think we are now at the point where microservices have reached a key threshold in maturity. In 2020, I expect to see a lot more industry standardization around the simplification of networking in microservices architectures, related troubleshooting, and application development. The results of this increased industry-wide standardization will be realized quickly, via significantly more efficient development.

2: An evolution of discrete tooling yields more all-encompassing solutions.

Application developers now must work with a number of different network tools, such as ingresses, service meshes, API gateways, etc. I predict that in the interest of streamlining and reducing some key developer pain points, there will be a much-needed consolidation between all of these tools into more comprehensive networking solutions.

3: ISV consolidation.

As a result of this predicted move to standardization and more all-in-one tooling, expect 2020 to see many more acquisitions and mergers amongst software vendors to meet this market demand. For many not caught up in that M&A, they will instead find themselves needing to expand the capabilities they sell in order to remain competitive. While the outcome for specific tech vendors will vary during this period of consolidation, the biggest winner of the trend will certainly be developers, who stand to eliminate much frustration by improved functionality around networking in microservices architectures.

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About the Author

Emile Vauge is the CEO and a co-founder at Containous. Containous is the company behind Traefik, the cloud-native edge router, and Maesh, a service mesh for simplifying service-to-service communications for developers building cloud-native applications. Before founding Containous, Emile held technical roles at Zenika, Lyra Network and Airbus.