By Jonathan LaCour, Chief Technology Officer at Mission

Ongoing Battle of Public Clouds Will Spur Even More Kubernetes and Serverless Adoption

Public clouds have driven a complete transformation of business and technology landscapes over the past decade. As we begin another (whether that’s already started or coming soon), here are key trends to pay attention to in 2020 and beyond:

1) Hyperscale public cloud providers will spur even more Kubernetes adoption by conquering management complexity.

Kubernetes will only become more widespread as hyperscale public cloud providers roll out fully-managed Kubernetes offerings. Developers have rightfully made Kubernetes exceptionally popular to its ability to automate the deployment, operation, and scaling of applications based on microservices (as well as its vendor-agnostic status). However, early Kubernetes adopters found that the simplicity provided in those areas was paired with time-consuming complexity when it came to managing and operating Kubernetes itself.

In 2020, expect developers to flock to newly available fully-managed Kubernetes services from AWS, Microsoft, and Google - all designed to alleviate a lot of that complexity. At the same time, expect a fresh wave of Kubernetes adoption driven by the simplicity these fully-managed services offer, as well as continuing rapid growth in the ecosystem of complementary tools supporting Kubernetes deployments.

2) Serverless will add new services that advance it well beyond "functions."

AWS will continue to lead the way in serverless computing, not just by evolving AWS Lambda to help developers more effectively leverage functions, but by offering a full suite of solutions covering the breadth of serverless application development needs. AWS now offers managed services addressing compute, storage, orchestration, databases, analytics, and other areas that simplify the work of building and running serverless applications.

Application developers can utilize AWS Lambda, AWS Fargate, Amazon S3, DynamoDB, Aurora Serverless, and Amazon API Gateway to eliminate the requirements of managing and maintaining servers or associated execution environments while developing powerful, sophisticated, and cost-efficient applications. Developers should anticipate that AWS will debut countless new serverless services throughout 2020, driving increased serverless adoption while prompting the other major public cloud providers to accelerate their own serverless offerings.

3) The battle for dominance among public clouds will escalate in 2020 as Microsoft leverages its existing enterprise customer base to bite into AWS' lead.

Public cloud is the largest growth market of all time in the computing sector. With such a rich prize up for the taking, it's no surprise that the battle over public cloud market share will continue to be feverishly fought in 2020 (and, of course, well beyond). While AWS leads the race as the undisputed market leader, Microsoft and Google are in hot pursuit and making major strategic moves to close that gap.

In third place, Google has fought and struggled to gain significant traction with enterprises, albeit while offering some compelling technical advances. Microsoft, however, is committing deep investments to incentivize its broad Windows, Office, and SQL Server enterprise install base and enterprise sellers to adopt its Azure cloud service rather than AWS. Microsoft also recently achieved a major (and majorly surprising,) victory over AWS by winning the U.S Department of Defense's $10B JEDI contract, which AWS was previously considered a shoo-in for (to such a degree that Oracle sued over the alleged unfairness in AWS's favor). Expect public cloud to be even more of a battlefield in 2020, with Microsoft's efforts becoming even more aggressive as the company leverages its licensing and price breaks to transition enterprise customers to Azure instead of competitors.

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About the Author

Jonathan LaCour is the Chief Technology Officer at Mission, which helps businesses architect, migrate, manage, and optimize their AWS environments. He has held several technical and product leadership positions throughout his career - most recently at DreamHost, one of the largest web hosting and cloud computing providers. As CTO at Mission, Jonathan guides the development of Mission's product and platform.