Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2016. Read them in this 8th Annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Sirish Raghuram, co-founder and CEO of Platform9
3 Predictions about Cloud Infrastructure for 2016
Like many in the cloud infrastructure space, I am excited about all the technologies and possibilities that continue to emerge and develop. Here are a couple of my predictions for the coming year in the cloud – do you agree?
IT will be challenged with supporting virtualized and containerized workloads
The year 2015 saw more developers learn about Containers, and learn about patterns to write applications using the micro-services paradigm. In 2016, more of these applications will run in production in the enterprise, challenging IT with supporting both virtualized and containerized workloads. The differences in these technologies will lead to operational challenges and IT will have to innovate to support such mixed-mode environments.
Public cloud users will realize there is no free lunch
AWS continues to blaze new trails with their pace of innovation and rapid growth. Hype around the public cloud has led to continued interest in the public cloud from Enterprise IT, and there are a lot of organizations expecting the public cloud to magically provide a simpler, faster, and less expensive infrastructure solution. In 2016, a lot of these organizations will use the public cloud at larger scale, but will be disappointed on the cost front: they will find that controlling spending is hard, and that the TCO of public clouds is higher than expected. Many of these organizations will be forced to revisit their assumptions and plan for a hybrid environment instead.
IT will be asked “Why not OpenStack?”
After going through some growing pains in 2014 and early 2015, OpenStack continues to remain the top platform of interest for private clouds. With the emergence of solutions that make OpenStack really easy to deploy and run, along with growing customer awareness about the automation possibilities, OpenStack will become the “safe” choice within enterprise IT. Last year, IT was taking a big risk by trying OpenStack. Next year, IT will more likely get asked the question: “Why not OpenStack?”
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About the Author
Sirish Raghuram is co-founder and CEO of Platform9, the company making private clouds easy with the industry’s first OpenStack-as-a-Service solution for KVM, VMware vSphere or Docker. Before co-founding Platform9, Sirish was an early engineer at VMware.
