Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2024. Read them in this 16th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Continued Focus on Cost Reduction
By Flynn, Technology Evangelist, Buoyant
As we head into 2024, economists and analysts have predicted that the U.S. economy and global economic growth will slow compared to previous years. The World Economic Forum went so far as to call economic prospects “anemic,” and the tech space is not immune to this. In fact, we’ve already seen technology companies tighten their belts, reducing staff and overhead costs. We predict that the platform engineering and cloud industries as a whole will see a continued focus on cost reduction in 2024.
With budgets under the microscope, engineering teams must pay close attention to efficiency without sacrificing application performance. Specifically, technology leaders will need to take advantage of new tools to get a handle on cloud cost monitoring and governance. Let’s take a look at some of the specific technologies and scenarios that we predict will play a role in this.
Cost Cutting through Operational Simplicity
It is not uncommon for open source projects with the same or similar functionality to differ in terms of operational complexity. Whether you select a tool that can be managed by one engineer as part of their daily job or one that requires a team will significantly impact costs.
Service meshes are one example. They provide network security, reliability, and observability and are regarded as critical infrastructure tools, at least if you’re running larger deployments. A service mesh like the CNCF’s Linkerd, which is built on ultra-light Rust-based micro-proxies, is known for its operational simplicity and performance. It requires little to no configuration for standard implementations, and we have yet to hear from an end user who needs a team to manage Linkerd. In contrast, many other service meshes, especially those based on general-purpose proxies, have dedicated teams managing them, dramatically increasing costs.
This, of course, does not only apply to service meshes. The complexity of open source projects and products can vary widely. To avoid unexpected operational complexity, companies should carefully compare tools and run POCs before committing to one.
As more and more engineering teams have been burned by the hidden cost of open source, we predict that there will be an increase in the number of businesses that will start looking at operational simplicity more closely.
Could Cost-Aware Cloud Computing Traffic Routing be the Solution?
As more businesses move to a cloud-native model, the cost of cloud networks can become challenging to predict. This is because there are many cost factors that need to be considered: the type of data and size of data that is being moved, what methods are being used, what points in the network the data passes through, and more are all factors in determining cloud traffic costs.
However, it is possible to implement a properly cost-aware traffic routing infrastructure. We predict that we will see more products start to emphasize features specifically intended to reduce cross-zone network costs above and beyond the baseline zone-aware routing available in stock Kubernetes.
Cost Reduction with Platform Engineering
Another route to managing cost is leaning on platform engineering for greater efficiency in the process of delivering software. Historically, the path from commit to deployment has been anything but smooth for cloud native software: we’ve seen many examples of manual (and often undocumented) processes making it harder for developers to get their changes out into the world, needlessly slowing development.
We expect to see an uptick in strategic investment in platform engineering, to automate and streamline the process of getting changes running in production. For example, simply reducing the number of manual tasks associated with microservices and cloud native environments will lower development and operational costs. Likewise, greater investment in GitOps can lead to easier migrations and disaster recovery, in addition to providing audit trails for changes. Centralizing these effects in a unified platform engineering group is a trend we expect to continue.
Do your research
With cost reductions throughout the industry in 2024, keeping platform engineering initiatives efficient requires careful planning and budgeting. Move forward with your eyes wide open and be sure to bring all potential costs to the table, from cloud traffic patterns, computing resources, and security to memory and RAM to staff, before making changes that could impact performance.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Flynn is a technology evangelist at Buoyant, spreading the good word and educating developers about the Linkerd service mesh, Kubernetes, and cloud-native development in general. He has spent four decades in software engineering – from the kernel up through distributed applications, with a common thread of communications and security throughout – and is the original author and a maintainer of the Emissary-ingress API gateway. He is most easily found as @flynn on the CNCF or Linkerd Slacks.
