Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022. Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Data, As-a-Service, and Containers
By Murli Thirumale, VP and general
manager of Pure Storage's Cloud Native Business Unit - Portworx
As we enter 2022, successful organizations
will throw traditional ideas about IT infrastructure out the window and start
looking at technology as an agility enabler. If the last couple of years have
taught us anything, it's that modern businesses (and their IT leaders) cannot
afford to operate under the status quo. Instead, it's critical that they ensure
the right infrastructure and technology partners are in place to overcome
challenges and barriers. With that being said, here are my predictions for 2022
and beyond:
The Modern CIO will Invest in Data
Building a flexible infrastructure and
delivering agile applications is no longer a competitive advantage. In fact,
it's the bare minimum that CIOs must invest in to keep the lights on and
maintain reliable day-to-day business operations. The agility and intelligence
needed to succeed in the modern era is truly about creating real-time
actionable insights from data services - from machine learning/AI to
as-a-service offerings, and more. The CIOs we'll see next year will place a
heightened focus on deriving value from data to enable modern (and innovative)
products, services, and customer experiences.
Moving Up The Stack with As-a-Service Will Be IT Table
Stakes
The old IT ecosystem relied on building
traditional hardware infrastructure. Then software ate the world. Middleware
emerged to become the connective tissue, gluing everything together, with
applications sitting on top of the stack. In 2022, we'll see the deconstruction
of this traditional IT stack into a new world of IT: as-a-service. This
preferred model of consumption will significantly diminish the standalone value
of hardware, middleware, and major application players everywhere.
Organizations that aren't moving up the stack rapidly, won't stand the test of
time. As-a-service will eat software.
Containers Will Become No-Brainers For Midmarket
Companies Too
Previously, Global 2000 companies were those
that could afford to experiment and deploy newer technologies like containers.
After all, they have the means to staff talented DevOps teams and invest in
multi-year transformation initiatives. However, as containers move past the
stages of initial innovation and adoption, and the industry moves into early
maturity, midmarket companies will begin deploying and experimenting with this
technology even more. Not only will containers work better out of the box,
they'll be delivered as-a-service and consumed with ease.
Consolidating Database Operations Will Rise to the Top of
IT Leaders' Wishlists
In recent years we've seen the proliferation
of databases. Where there were only a few key winners in the legacy database
game, IT leaders are now faced with managing a growing number of databases as
developers continue to leverage their preferred method of charting data,
working with increasingly large data sets, and more. In 2022, IT will place a
heightened focus on finding ways to consolidate how they run these databases.
Why? Every database installs in different ways, manages data in different ways,
and ultimately scales in different ways. Organizations cannot afford to hire
individual experts for each database to run them in IT Ops. They will look for
platforms that can consolidate the Day 1 and Day 2 operations of different
databases around functions like database sizing, replication, patching and
upgrades so they are not caught in an operational quagmire.
Kubernetes will move beyond orchestration, to serve as an
infrastructure control plane.
Kubernetes successfully established itself as
the way to orchestrate containers. In the last five years, IT managers
recognized that they wanted to extend Kubernetes to manage compute, storage and
networking and CNCF obliged by creating extensions for Kubernetes to manage
these. CSI (Container Storage Interface) and CNI (Container Network Interface)
are examples of these extensions. Leading Fortune 2000 companies are using
Kubernetes as their new control plane for infrastructure management using
overlay software and these interfaces to manage their storage, networking and
compute capex using Kubernetes and getting the agility scale and cost savings
of Kubernetes for IT as well as applications. Kubernetes has blossomed into a
dual role: orchestrating containers and orchestrating infrastructure. This
trend will ramp rapidly and enter early majority from early adoption.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Murli is VP and general manager of Pure
Storage's Cloud Native Business Unit - Portworx, where he is responsible for
strategy, operations and solutions that deliver multicloud data services for
Kubernetes.