Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2021. Read them in this 13th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Cloud Native Meets the Edge, Pandemic After Effects and Pervasive Machine Learning
By Chip Childers, Exec director, Cloud Foundry Foundation
The
trends of digitization, consumerization of IT, adoption of both open source
software and cloud have continued to grow year after year, but the global
pandemic brought about an extraordinary surge in 2020. The global pandemic laid
plain the need for organizations to be quick to respond to changing conditions.
Those of us that were lucky enough to be able to work from home for months at a
time struggled to keep our human connections going, leading to a surge in
demand for video conferencing, virtual event platforms and work from home
technologies. It has been quite a year of change, much of which will be with us
for years to come.
With
2020 nearing an end, here are three predictions for the enterprise technology
space in 2021 (and one prediction, just for fun, about technology for our new
office... our home).
Cloud
native moves to the edge
"Cloud
Native" has become the dominant infrastructure style and application design
trend for the last several years. The benefits of this style of computing are
being experienced by a large number of organizations and individual
technologists. A parallel trend has been the explosion of edge computing
capabilities and platforms, aligned with the digitization of industrial systems
from manufacturing to supply-chain management. While there are plenty of
differences between cloud and edge computing, one critical similarity is that
software is what makes the infrastructure useful.
The
Cloud Native movement has evolved as a set of technologies and practices that
help shorten software development cycles. Edge computing will start to see
demand for these faster iterations, and therefore we will see the adaptation of
cloud native technologies for edge computing scenarios accelerate beyond the
early steps of 2020.
The
Digitization of Business is Here to Stay
The
global pandemic made it remarkably clear which industries and companies had
already embraced digital engagement channels, and which had not. Unfortunately
for some, the consumer demand for digital-first engagement, brought about by
the global pandemic, left many scrambling to catch up. While it is unfortunate
that some companies were not well positioned to respond to changing business
conditions, there were many companies that actually thrived this year.
The
pandemic has changed our world where digital engagement is now expected to be
the primary method of engagement. In 2021, don't expect this shift to revert to
pre-pandemic behaviors. Even after we get a handle on the pandemic itself,
consumers have seen how convenient digital engagement is for them.
Office-workers around the world have learned to work from home, or really from
anywhere. While we all yearn for more human connections again, we will want
these moments of connection to be meaningful and have much less patience for
those old face-to-face interactions that were, frankly, a waste of time.
Machine
Learning will Become More Approachable for Developers
Machine
learning is coming into its own in 2020, as advancements in the core
technologies and new "as a service" ML services are being launched by every
major cloud provider. This technology will continue to be adopted in 2021, in
large part through simplification for application developers. We will see a
rush of new tooling that allows developers without deep knowledge of the
underlying ML technologies to be productive while integrating the capability
into their software. This will include pre-trained models, easier model
training and API accessible services wrapping up ML tools.
As
an example, the "typical" software developer hasn't developed a deep
understanding of how to work with frameworks like Google's Tensorflow. Google
Cloud has already built a suite of machine learning services, spanning
infrastructure services optimized for building models as well as higher level
capabilities like its Cloud Translation service. The other hyperscale cloud
providers have similar suites of services. While the spectrum of offerings is
good, that "typical" developer can only easily take advantage of the higher
level offerings. I expect to see an explosion of those services, but also the
evolution of the lower level options to be much more developer friendly.
Major
Advancements of Internet of (Home) Things
While
I usually focus on the enterprise and developer part of the technology
industry, I'm both a user and an advocate for home automation. For a bit of
fun, here's my prediction for the consumer IoT space.
The
last several years have seen an explosion in IoT devices for home consumers,
but internet connected doesn't usually equal "smart" in my experience. With so
many people spending much more time at home in 2020, many of these products and
platforms are seeing much more use than ever before. It has become glaringly
obvious that the promise of a connected home that automatically responds to the
needs of the residents isn't here yet. As one example, there's no easy way for
most smart home systems to actually know who is at home. Sure, that's possible
based on a phone's location being detected or motion sensing devices to sense
motion. But, using the phone has problems like: What about the kids who are too
young to own their own phone? What about visitors or guests? What if I dare to
power my phone off for a couple of hours?
In
2021, expect suppliers of smart home devices to make a major push toward a
connected home model, which some are referring to as "ambient home computing".
We should see platforms and products start working together in more seamless
and intelligent ways, not just being responsive to different automation
triggers, but predictive of the needs of the user. The vendors will start
getting "smart" about embedding presence sensors in all of their devices to
increase coverage of the home and improve accuracy in determining if anyone is
home. They should also start getting better at conditional logic, but not
requiring the consumer to build that logic. A great example of this would be
scenes, perhaps triggered by voice commands, being smart enough to adapt to
where people are in the house. Imagine an "evening" scene that usually turns
off the lights in rooms you don't use often in the evening, but is proactive
enough to keep the kitchen lights on when someone is actually in that room.
We
should see much more intelligent automation become friendly for consumers. This
shift won't be completed in 2021, but it will start in earnest. How vendors
will make this happen, while following the principle of "don't surprise the
user", will be interesting to see.
Can
we really predict what will happen in 2021?
As
I said at the start, 2020 was a unique year (to say the least). The
acceleration of existing technology trends was forced on everyone, due to both
the urgency of necessity and the discovery of new opportunities that some were
lucky enough to find unfolding. We will keep progressing rapidly as an industry
next year, and many of the changes brought about in 2020 will be with us for
years into the future.
There
is a software release approach referred to as "rolling forward", where you
never revert your production systems to an older version even if a regression
or new bug is found. You fix the bug and release yet another new version.
Rolling forward is a philosophy that puts a priority on getting features in the
hands of the users. Our industry is behaving in much the same way ... we'll keep
rolling forward, adjusting and reacting as new challenges arise. The trends are
clear, but the unpredictable nature of our world makes it quite difficult to
see what we have in store for us in the coming months. That said, 2021 should
be yet another interesting year as we hopefully come out of the pandemic that
has impacted all our lives so dramatically.
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About the Author
Chip has spent 20 years in large-scale computing and open source
software. In 2020, he took over as Executive Director at Cloud Foundry
Foundation, which he co-founded in 2015. He was the first VP of Apache
Cloudstack, a platform he helped drive while leading
Enterprise Cloud Services at SunGard and then as VP Product Strategy at
Cumulogic. Prior to SunGard, he led the rebuild of mission-critical
applications for organizations including IRS.gov, USMint.gov, Merrill Lynch and
SEI Investments. Chip is an experienced speaker at events like OSCON, LinuxCon
North America, LC Japan, LC EU, ApacheCon, O'Reilly Software Architecture
Conference, and many more. In his free time, Chip loves trail hiking with his
black lab, sailing catamarans and sunfish, and trying to keep up with his young
daughter.