Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022. Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
2022 in Containerization Will Be About the Dev Experience and Reducing Kubernetes Bills
By Stacy
Tumarkin, Head of Operations at Kubecost
Don't expect Kubernetes growth to
slow down at all in 2022. However, what will
change for enterprises is an evolving approach to Kubernetes strategy across
several fronts.
Here are three Kubernetes trends to
pay attention to in the coming year:
1) The developer experience around Kubernetes becomes a focal point - and a
competitive differentiator.
While the rush to Kubernetes will
continue, adoption rates may be hampered by the increasingly-challenging
complexity of operating it. This reality ties into the increasing challenge of
hiring the relatively rare talent capable of managing these environments
effectively. It's already an employees' job market, and 2022 will likely
tighten the screws on the market even more for enterprises. Staffing will
require organizations to win over devs and engineers with more than the table
stakes of a competitive salary and benefits package. What we'll see in 2022 are
more enterprises being purposeful about the developer experience around
Kubernetes operation and management that they can offer prospective team
members, and ideally be able to differentiate as destinations where top talent
wants to come to work.
To offer experiences that can ease
and automate some of the complexity around Kubernetes, we're likely to see a
2022 uptick in enterprises building or adopting their own internal developer
platforms (IDPs). Relatedly, I expect organizations to increasingly implement
more robust and capable governance to assist development teams managing
Kubernetes resources across environments, whether on-prem or in the cloud.
Enterprises pursuing these measures to improve their developer experiences will
more easily and rapidly scale their Kubernetes environments in 2022, amounting
to a decisive advantage.
2) Enterprises turn attention to reining in Kubernetes costs.
In their initial rush to stand up
Kubernetes environments and realize the benefits of more modernized application
development, many organizations allowed costs to slide to the back burner. With
these environments maturing (and in most cases expanding), expect
more enterprises in 2022 to recognize that inefficient Kubernetes spending is
unsustainable at scale. While modern toolsets have exacerbated this issue by
making it simple to overprovision Kubernetes resources and offering limited
visibility into that spending, expect 2022 strategies to begin taking a
magnifying glass to their Kubernetes costs. In the coming year, look for
enterprises to introduce real-time Kubernetes cost visibility and management
capabilities, and enforce cost efficiency across teams through showback,
chargeback, and hybrid strategies.
3) Enterprises will increasingly leverage spot instances to reduce
Kubernetes costs.
The major cloud providers sell their
excess compute capacity as spot instances, at deep discounts up to 90 percent.
But it comes with a wrinkle: the resources can become unavailable on short
notice. Kubernetes is highly-capable of moving workloads quickly as resources
change, making it a strong match for taking advantage of spot instances.
However, the work of selecting the workloads that can safely run on spot instances,
and choosing the right nodes to use in the right number, is challengingly
complex. In 2022, I think we'll see enterprises get more strategic and
purposeful with utilizing spot instances, unlocking considerable savings for
their organizations.
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ABOUT THE
AUTHOR
Stacy
Tumarkin is Head of Operations at Kubecost, a tool delivering Kubernetes cost
monitoring and management at scale. She has helped scale operations in leadership roles at multiple
high-growth companies, and holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth
School of Business.