Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 16 | Page 30

TALKING BUSINESS APIS HAVE BEEN AN INTEGRAL PART OF OPEN SOURCE FOR A WHILE, AND IN 2017 THE NEED FOR GOOD QUALITY APIS INCREASES. SMOOTH AND EASY INTEGRATIONS FUEL SWIFT IMPLEMENTATIONS AND OPEN THE DOOR TO SPEEDY, FEATURE RICH DEPLOYMENTS. VENDORS WHO DO NOT PROVIDE GOOD APIS WILL MISS OUT IN 2017 MOHAMMED AL-MONEER Regional Director, MENA, A10 Networks which improves the scalability and stability of applications at a price that is easier for organizations to swallow. 5 Enterprise DevOps adoption intensifies. Until recently, DevOps stymied the enterprise. They knew they needed to adopt this new skillset and the principles that come with it, but through a lack of available talent and ambiguous definitions, they’ve been left a bit in the dark. As DevOps tools and processes become more mainstream, enterprises in 2017 will finally be able to take advantage of DevOps and break down the barriers between developers and IT. 6 Automation. Automation. Automation. Next year, automation becomes more important. Mainly fueled by enterprise DevOps adoption, the automation of software delivery and infrastructure changes will free developers to spend more time creating and less time worrying about infrastructure. Development teams want to leverage large amounts of powerful software quickly; improved automation allows this. 30 INTELLIGENTCIO 7 Service providers leverage OpenStack. OpenStack’s maturity, combined with its inherent cost savings, will drive more service providers to deploy it as their open- source software of choice to power private and public clouds. OpenStack makes it easier and cheaper for service providers to hire developers to build what they need rather than buying a bulky proprietary solution and making limited customisations. Hundreds of companies already use OpenStack to control their compute, storage and networking resources, and its friendliness with heterogeneous infrastructure makes it an ideal solution for service providers who don’t want to be tied to a single cloud solution. OpenStack will be a strong contender in the service provider market for years to come. 8 Enterprises look toward public clouds. For most enterprises, their main focus isn’t technology. Businesses want turnkey offerings versus customised and specialised solutions. As such, 2017 will be the year enterprises lean more heavily on public cloud providers. 9 Common Service APIs grow in importance. APIs have been an integral part of open source for a while, and in 2017 the need for good quality APIs increases. Smooth and easy integrations fuel swift implementations and open the door to speedy, feature rich deployments. Vendors who do not provide good APIs will miss out in 2017. Open-source projects will continue to emerge to further development using RESTful APIs, which deliver application back-end services and other functionality. 10 Architectures get more standardised. The implementation of frameworks will make most infrastructure look the same, which will lead to cloud infrastructure looking similar because the underlying infrastructure is more services-based versus network topology. For businesses, this means they’ll care less about the infrastructure itself and more about the services that power it. www.intelligentcio.com