Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2021. Read them in this 13th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
The Rise of the Database and the Developer
By Spencer Kimball, CEO
and co-founder of Cockroach Labs
The data revolution
is starting to spread across industries. The same approach that drove the
breakthroughs in digital transformation is driving rapid advances in
data-driven applications, dynamic experiences, and model-powered decision
making creating a wave of modern applications powered by algorithms and AI.
This revolution is also beginning to separate winners from losers, similar to
what we saw at the onset of digital transformation. Early innovators reaped
massive benefits, while laggards seemingly evaporated overnight. That will
happen again, and sooner than we all might realize.
Transactional data will be the next to move the cloud
as companies modernize their infrastructure:
Although we've seen a massive shift to cloud-based analytics databases (with
Snowflake being the biggest winner in 2020), many of the world's biggest companies
have been reluctant to follow suit with Online Transaction Processing (OLTP)
databases. Traditionally, companies in highly regulated sectors like financial
services or healthcare have opted to dedicate significant resources to managing
systems of records internally to avoid handing over their sensitive and
valuable data to a third party. In 2021, as more companies move to the cloud
and reassess their tech stack in order to better meet customer needs and remain
competitive, we will see a significant shift. Enterprises will adopt
service-based OLTP database offerings in droves, freeing up budget and
man-hours to allocate to other pressing challenges that have accompanied this
year's expedited digital transformations.
While Kubenetes is experiencing its "moment,"
Serverless is not far behind: In 2021, behind the
continued explosion of Kubernetes, the next generation of developers will
quickly take up the mantle with serverless. Serverless will emerge from the
trough of disillusionment as the solution for enabling developers to use the
cloud-native infrastructure stack to simplify the deployment, monitoring, and
running of these applications. Developers will not have to think about
deploying nodes or virtual machines. We will start to see everything in the database
become extracted and virtualized. Serverless still has a way to go, but anyone
who thinks serverless has seen its best days or is too far fetched is in for a
treat. As developers take on more of the decision-maker role, we will start to
see a shift in the kind of tools developers will seek and implement. Being able
to scale globally is possible with Kubernetes, but is very complex. Serverless
provides a nice package to achieve global scale.
The developer will emerge as the new decision-maker: To keep up with big tech over the next two years, companies of all
sizes will need to adopt a cloud-native infrastructure, dramatically
accelerating a transformation that would typically take over a decade. With
that change, we'll start to the responsibilities of the traditional developer
will start to shift, merging expectations regardless of specialty. A new
generation of more strategic-minded developers is emerging that will drive
innovation and become the most influential people in the tech arm of companies.
The most successful organizations of the next 10 years will be those that
empower developers to not just have a say in the decision-making process, but
those that enable developers to work directly with CTOs to bring in tools that
can accelerate the creation and simplify the management of new products and
services. As we look to 2021 and beyond, the most relevant products and
services will be the ones that resonate with these developers and supercharge
their output.
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About the Author

Spencer Kimball is
the co-founder and CEO of Cockroach Labs, where he maintains a delicate balance
between a love for programming distributed systems and the excitement of
helping the company grow smoothly. While in university, he was one of the
original authors of the GIMP. He cut his teeth on databases during the dot com
heyday, and had a front-row seat at Google for a decade's worth of their
evolution.