FINAL WORD
“
MULTI-CLOUD WILL
BECOME THE DOMINANT MODE IN
2018, WHILE TRUE HYBRID CLOUDS
WILL START TO EMERGE.
services. IBM has announced its private
cloud will support Kubernetes in its Bluemix
public cloud; AWS is lining up behind it
as well and has joined the Cloud Native
Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a
platinum member
Kamal Anand, VP of the A10 Cloud
Business Unit
mash-ups will create hybrid clouds that truly
blend environments and further improve
operational agility, efficiency and scale.
Kubernetes dominates
container orchestration
The fight for container orchestration
dominance has been one of the cloud’s main
events for roughly the past two years. The
three-way battle between Docker Swarm,
Kubernetes and Mesos has been fierce.
Come 2018, however, Kubernetes is poised
to take the container orchestration title belt
and also become increasingly mainstream
with mission critical, scalable production
deployments. Its rich set of contributors,
rapid development of capabilities and
support across many disparate platforms
make it a clear victor.
And it has the help of some very powerful
friends: Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud
have launched a managed Kubernetes
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INTELLIGENTCIO
‘function’ has become an even smaller unit
of ‘use.’ Putting the onus of managing and
scaling up resources on demand on the
cloud provider is cost-efficient and takes the
heavy lifting off IT. And paying based on a
consumption model makes it more gentle on
already strained budgets.
Currently available in the public cloud, this
year will see serverless computing start to
appear in private cloud deployments as well.
While it won’t become mainstream, wider
adoption will happen in the short term.
All of this combined pushes Kubernetes
into more mainstream deployments with
continued growth in large production
workloads next year. Serverless computing, coupled with the
continue maturation of cloud, puts pressure
on server and hardware vendors to transform
their business models to maintain relevance
in the new virtual, elastic and automated
cloud-powered world.
Analytics get an AI upgrade Custom cloud instances proliferate
AI is everywhere. It’s in our homes
with Amazon Echo. And in 2018, it’ll be
embedded more tightly in IT analytics
systems making IT proactive versus reactive. As cloud adoption grows, compute instance
types will become further segmented and
optimised for specific use cases; enabling
improved performance and new use
cases. We will see growth in the number of
application-specific instance types within
clouds – from big data and AI-optimised
instances to high network performance and
very large memory types. Custom optimised
applications that take advantage of these
capabilities will start appearing.
Through predictive analytics, IT and
application owners will receive actionable
information and recommendations. Add to
that the ability to automate their response,
and the power of AI becomes more relevant.
Analytics systems will have insight into
the behaviour of the infrastructure, apps
and clients. It will recognise anomalous
performance or security behaviour and
when an app or server is going to fail. Once
that behaviour is noticed, automation
can kick in to remediate the potential
problem, i.e. firing up another server or
load balancing the app. It’s like your
infrastructure can say “Alexa, spin up
another server.”
Serverless computing
adoption spreads
One of the benefits of cloud is ease of use for
spinning up additional resources and its pay
by use consumption model. Nowhere is that
more evident than in serverless computing.
Previously, the unit for additional compute
resource was an instance or VM. Now a
Kiss cloud security concerns goodbye
Security is noticeably absent from this list of
cloud predictions. Why? Simple. It’s time to
move on.
Yes, security is always important, and even
more so in the cloud. But it’s no longer the
hindrance it was when cloud was in its early
stages. Over the years, cloud and services
available on the cloud have matured.
There is more security built in. More tools
are available from vendors. Compliance
in the cloud has caught up. As with all
IT, it’s imperative to think about security
capabilities, policies and governance
when deploying clouds or making a major
change to your infrastructure, but in 2018
cloud will no longer be considered not
secure by default. n
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