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5 Cloud Native Predictions for 2023

By Tobi Knaup, CEO and co-founder at D2iQ

In 2022, cloud native and Kubernetes continued to grow rapidly as digital transformation gained popularity across all industries. Heading into 2023, economic uncertainty continues to be top of mind for all business leaders. To remain competitive in 2023, cloud-native technologies are critical for any organization that wants to survive and thrive in the current uncertain economic environment.

In collaboration with D2iQ's CTO Deepak Goel, we looked at the current industry landscape and put together the following list of predictions for the upcoming year. With a more efficient team, optimized management platform, and secure and collaboration-friendly environment for any infrastructure, in 2023, enterprises and organizations will be more confident in meeting the challenges posed by the market.

Accelerated digital transformation has led to more distributed IT infrastructures, with Kubernetes becoming the de facto standard for managing containerized environments. Although there are many benefits to using Kubernetes in hybrid and multi-cloud environments, Kubernetes is a complex technology that requires deep technical skills to deploy and manage. Because Kubernetes is a relatively new technology, the talent pool of skilled Kubernetes engineers is limited. This is why we expect to see organizations gradually abandon DIY Kubernetes projects and put their budgets toward training and technology for their Kubernetes deployments and projects.

Considering the economic uncertainty over the next year, CIOs and business decision-makers are being forced to look at their budgets closely and be more selective on which technology investments to move forward with. One critical factor during this time is the growing skills gap in emerging technology sectors. In an effort to bridge this gap, technology and tools that are both impacting the business's bottom line and are easy to deploy and maintain will rise to top priority.

With the rapid development of Kubernetes and cloud-native applications, organizations are realizing the inadequacies of their IT teams to leverage DevOps practices. We've seen that DevOps workload is difficult to practice in small and medium-sized enterprises, as well as in large enterprises that lack sufficient talent. The gradually accumulated cognitive load ultimately leads to a less agile and efficient collaboration between teams.

Given these issues, more organizations in 2023 will reassess the DevOps model and adopt platform engineering as an alternative. With the rapid development of cloud-native applications, platform engineering will gradually replace DevOps in many organizations by providing the Internal Developer Platform that provides a "golden path" to more easily deploy, manage, and scale Kubernetes and applications on top.

Organizations are struggling to monitor and control costs in the cloud, leading to wasted resources and excessive spending. A FinOps Foundation survey, for example, found that "Insufficient - or nonexistent - Kubernetes cost monitoring is causing overspend." A recent KPMG survey showed that roughly 67% of 1,000 senior technology leaders at U.S. firms across industries said they have yet to see a significant return on cloud investments.

The solution is to build in cost visibility and management from the beginning, with unified views across all environments, and to share resources whenever possible. Automation in the form of cost management tools like Kubecost will increasingly be integrated into Kubernetes platforms to provide real-time granular cost monitoring and analysis across disparate environments. In addition, centralized management will enable more efficient resource-sharing across teams and infrastructure platforms.

In 2023, organizations will continue to build and deploy cloud-native applications at the edge, ushering in the hyperconnected era.

Decentralization is beneficial for edge computing and AI because it enables more responsive and interactive applications while processing data more efficiently at the point of collection. However, as operations become more distributed, managing the dispersed environments becomes more difficult and leads to siloes and inefficiencies. A centralized management platform can bring consistency and reduce the time and effort involved in managing dispersed locations, devices, and data. Given the IT budget and cost planning for 2023, more companies will recognize the need for centralized management to bring order to their decentralization infrastructures.

Considering next year's economic forecast, organizations need to focus more on efficiency and business value. This will lead them to embrace a hybrid approach of centralization and decentralization to optimize workflows and maximize business and capital value while deploying and managing their Kubernetes projects at the edge or across different infrastructure environments.

Kubernetes offers many advantages but also poses unique security challenges that can be difficult to address for organizations lacking in Kubernetes talent and experience. Although Kubernetes has many built-in security features, its security requires an understanding of how to address different types of vulnerabilities that can impact each part of the stack. For many organizations, Kubernetes security has been left for the architects and developer teams to manage. However, Kubernetes clusters are not secure by default, and as threats become more advanced and mature, it will be unrealistic to require developer teams to also be security experts.

This is why organizations will increasingly see the need to reevaluate their security practices and prioritize a more advanced security-focused culture in 2023. Deploying Kubernetes platforms with security built in by default will be recognized as a means to reduce the burden of security on IT teams. Keeping security and developer expertise separate will reduce the pressure and burnout on both sides.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A cloud native pioneer and evangelist, Tobi Knaup serves as the CEO of D2iQ. Previously, Tobi served as D2iQ's Chief Technology Officer. As the primary author of the world's first open-source container orchestrator (Marathon) and co-creator of the KUDO toolkit for building Kubernetes Operators, Tobi has the unique ability to understand an organization's cloud native journey from all levels--business, technological and talent. And as the driver behind D2iQ's next-generation Kubernetes platform, Tobi helps make it possible for organizations to navigate the cost and time-intensive challenges associated with enterprise-grade container orchestration.

Before co-founding D2iQ, Tobi was one of the first engineers and technology lead at Airbnb, proving the technology's value at scale in a production environment serving millions of users.

A German native, Tobi holds a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science from the Technical University of Munich.