Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2021.  Read them in this 13th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

A Closer Look at IT Spend and the Rise of Open-Source

By Joel Hans and Odysseas Lamtzidis, Netdata

2020 brought a myriad of challenges across all industries, with impacts of the pandemic dramatically shaping how businesses operate. As we continue to see spending shift towards the demand for remote-first tools, the cross-pollination and acceleration of new technologies, and a reignited interest in open-source projects from venture capitalists, 2021 is poised to be an exciting year for innovation.

Joel Hans, Editorial Director of Educational & Technical Resources

 

1.  IT leaders will reconsider their cloud spend. While cloud computing is one of the fastest-growing segments in IT spend in 2020, many organizations are starting to worry about the cost-value equation of "top-tier" cloud providers like AWS. While these providers offer many  value-add features that many SREs and Ops teams enjoy using, the costs associated with it can easily mount up and can get extremely expensive. 2021 will continue to see more discussions around whether teams should move to more affordable cloud providers and use a new batch of orchestration tools to manage their infrastructure or let top-tier cloud providers handle it.

2.  Kubernetes "k8" adoption will accelerate. Kubernetes, also known as k8s, is now pretty mature and very widespread among technology-focused companies. In 2021, we will see adoption of k8s accelerate even more now that there are more tools for "orchestrator your orchestrator." This means that k8 deployments will become easier than they were previously, and as smaller and less technical companies experiment with k8s, they will need to adapt to how they monitor their environment.

3.  Open-source projects will see more VC spend. 2021 will be the year where we'll see more VC money invested in "open core" projects. We may even see some open-source projects get approached by VCs who want to help the maintainer build a business model around a previously open-source project. In direct opposition, we will likely see faster growth of the GitHub Sponsor/Patreon model, which lets open-source projects stay autonomous and stick to their original product vision.

4.  Monitoring solutions will be in more demand. 2020 witnessed infrastructure as code as the hot new thing for SREs and DevOps teams. As such, monitoring solutions will need to fit that growing model by being deployable/configurable using these tools, and effectively interact with them.

5.  Infrastructure monitoring tools will be king in the new remote workplace. The pandemic affected how companies that are now working remotely do incident management. The idea of "on-call" is changing. Companies learned many lessons around ensuring that their infrastructure is efficient due to the influx of employees working from home and the unpredictable variables that came with this new norm. Companies are more likely to revamp their incident management plans and implement new infrastructure monitoring tools to prevent downtime and increase productivity across the myriad of applications that have now become a permanent fixture in the workplace.

Odysseas Lamtzidis, Developer Relations

 

1.  The need for remote-first tools will be a hot commodity. It's no surprise that the global pandemic has upended the way we work. With remote work becoming the de-facto reality, the need for remote-first tools will continue to be in demand more than ever before. 2021 will see an uptick in cloud platforms that offer integrations with collaboration tools or offer collaboration features in their products. Organizations will relook at what users day-to-day necessities are and will implement monitoring platforms that integrate with remote working tools such as Slack and Zoom. Modern solutions that focus on providing a virtual workspace will become more ingrained as distributed teams become more common and have the need for a solution that enables users to collaborate remotely.

2.  Cross-pollination across various technologies will be driven by open-source. According to our 5G case-study, more and more telcos are entering the open-source space as a way to foster innovation and cross-pollination across different technology teams and companies. We will continue to see this in 2021 as they adopt common open standards, speeding up the development and cross-functionality amongst systems of different vendors. Moreover, open-source allows anyone to participate, thus enabling disruptive innovation in the space.

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