Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2021. Read them in this 13th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
2021: The Year To Rein in YAML and Choose Opinionated Infrastructure
By Kit Merker, COO, Nobl9
If we’ve learned anything from 2020, it’s that predictions are folly. This year has brought major changes that we are still learning from, and it’s a no-brainer that remote work is here to stay. No one can argue against the prediction that home internet will be critical infrastructure, and it’s no doubt that companies will have to start learning how to manage a hybrid workplace environment.
So there’s at least a few things we can all see coming. But when I’ve been thinking about what 2021 could look like, I wanted to reach a little bit further beyond the obvious.
My first prediction is that 2021 will be the year that we reign in YAML. In recent years YAML has become the language of how engineers program Kubernetes and cloud native computing. At Nobl9, we’re big proponents of YAML, and we use it to help describe all our SLOs. It’s a great format for the machines, but it’s not the ideal language for the humans that have to manage thousands of lines. We see consistent progress wherein developers are learning from their experience to constantly improve the tooling and automation that surround YAML. This ongoing effort to take greater control of the language will become especially important in 2021 to accelerate the adoption of GitOps and IaC.
At Nobl9, we may be guilty of adding to the sheer volume of YAML. Our goal is to follow the conventions that are popular in the industry today. We let users generate YAML from our UI that they can check in. This is great for transparency and historical record keeping, and fits into a variety of developer workflows.
My second prediction involves opinionated infrastructure and the great return of PaaS. As a result of the multitude of options we have for running cloud infrastructure today, we’ve heard that many people are missing the good old days of platform-as-a-service infrastructure. The open-ended approaches to running cloud infrastructure that have developed in recent years, such as the Kubernetes project, have ultimately caused a bunch of different approaches. Because of all this growth, we’re predicting that 2021 will force people to relook at the automation and tooling they use to run their infrastructure. We expect that all these stacks for different ways of running computing will solidify, and people will be able to run their infrastructure more easily because they’ll actually constrain themselves with more opinionated systems. Conveniently, the return to more opinionated solutions also means using less YAML.
And to be clear, I’m not talking only about comprehensive developer platforms like Cloud Foundry. Platforms can be specific to discrete objectives developers need to achieve. For instance, what we’re building is an SLO platform that helps organizations measure reliability and efficiently achieve reliability for users. It’s an instrument on top of monitoring systems like Datadog and new Relic, that helps DevOps teams define SLOs and build automation atop that. The idea is to deliver a platform that predicts and prevents outages before they happen by measuring reliability metrics against a real goal and make better decisions about features versus technical debt and how to respond to incidents. It’s a platform for making better investment decisions around reliability and DevOps modernization. So, “platform as a service” needs to be thought of in a more broad sense than we’ve done in the past, when the term meant an environment that made infrastructure consumption simpler for developers.
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We could sit here all day tossing around ideas of exactly what 2021 will bring, but we know (from hard experience) that a lot could change in the next 12 months. For now, we’re comfortable placing our bets on YAML and PaaS. This time next year, we can look back and consider how well these predictions have aged.
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About the Author
Kit Merker is Chief Operating Officer at Nobl9, driving growth and execution for customers to achieve service reliability for modern cloud-native developers.
In his 20+ years of experience in large-scale software development projects, he has worked in a variety of roles from coding to engineering manager, evangelism to product management. Prior to Nobl9, Kit helped grow JFrog into a billion-dollar company and worked as a product manager for Kubernetes and related container initiatives for Google Cloud. Before that he spent 10 years at Microsoft, where he worked on several products – Windows, Azure, Office 365, & Bing.
Kit lives in Redmond, Washington, and enjoys playing the piano whenever he finds time.
