2019 was a defining year for cloud technologies, with many announcements making it difficult to have a clear picture of what's happening. There are 4 dominant trends in the cloud space that will shape developments in 2020.
In June 2014, Google announced that it was welcoming Docker, a new open source tool for managing workloads on large-scale computing and infrastructure. Docker was hailed as a technological revolution with headlines such as: “Google Unveils Its Secret Weapon for Cloud Computing.”.
This tool, to be called Kubernetes , would kickstart a massive shift in cloud computing technologies and the birth of a huge community. It would also be useful in the war for cloud computing market share, a war that Google, Microsoft, and Alibaba are waging against the dominant player Amazon Web Services.
What Kubernetes promised was simple. Docker made it easy to deliver standardized, portable software with these simple instructions: put your code, libraries, and parameters into a Docker container, and then run it anywhere without worrying about the platform, as long as Docker is installed. This way you now have multiple applications, packaged in containers, running on multiple computers in data centers and in the cloud.
Who controls which container will be active and where it will run? How will all the computers work as one unified computer to run your workload? This is called “orchestration” and Kubernetes is responsible for doing the above for us.
Of course, this idea wasn't new. Kubernetes, however, promised to let the community benefit from Google's experience on high-volume workloads using cheap infrastructure.
Delivering on these promises has been the dream of many businesses: to gain access to Google technologies and improve their digital game.
These promises were also a brilliant strategic move by Google. Standardizing the orchestration process would make it easier for users to run workloads, which would encourage them to migrate to this new paradigm. “Cloud-native” container applications are easier to run in the cloud than legacy applications, as well as to move from cloud to cloud. This would convince enterprises to both move their computing to the cloud (i.e., to grow the cloud computing market) and to move from cloud to cloud (i.e., to abandon Amazon’s services). Indirectly, Kubernetes was also an attempt to standardize the compatibility of cloud services.
Arriving at today
Beyond the initial enthusiasm, users have taken the use of Kubernetes seriously and its technology has become more stable.
Businesses realized that running Kubernetes requires highly specialized skills and a ton of accompanying software.
Google has donated Kubernetes to a newly formed foundation, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which is tasked with hosting open source projects that create “critical elements of the global technology infrastructure.”.
The community has grown and the annual Kubecon conference has evolved from a small event of 1,000 people to a global event of 12,000 people.
So what's next? What are the trends shaping the cloud technology landscape in 2020?
- Targeting businesses
The early years of Kubernetes may have been defined mostly by big headlines, but it is now evolving widely at scale.
A recent poll showed that 2019 was the year Kubernetes dominated container orchestration: 86% of respondents used it to consolidate their workload, compared to 57% in 2018. What is missing from the picture is the percentage of workloads that do not run in containers and remain in traditional architectures.
So, even though commercial system-supported Kubernetes solutions have been around for quite some time (Rancher, CoreOS, and OpenStack), there is still room to address the underserved but known business needs: access permissions, cost control, etc.
In 2019 we also heard some important news:
- Open Policy Agent, a suite of open source solutions, has been accepted into the Cloud Native Foundation. Shortly after, the program’s founders announced that their startup, Styra, has raised $14 million in funding. Essentially, this means that users will be able to define the rules of the code, making it easier to manage it in an automated way.
- Kubecost addressed the issue of managing the scale of infrastructure spending.
- Hybrid cloud is officially part of Kubernetes
It was clear from the start that Kubernetes would be a compatible technology for all cloud systems. What was less clear was whether hybrid cloud would be on the menu.
From Microsoft's perspective, it was pretty clear. Microsoft Azure was the first major cloud to embrace the hybrid model. Since 2016, Azure Stack has allowed users to run a private data center using technology similar to Azure and connect a customer's Azure cloud to private and public clouds through a common interface. It didn't include Kubernetes, though, until the preview of Azure Arc in November.
Users can now run containers in Kubernetes clusters, whether they are in Azure or another cloud service, or on private infrastructure, and manage everything through a common Azure interface.
Amazon also joined the effort at the end of 2018 and is now gradually opening its AWS Outposts, placing a hybrid stack of Amazon hardware/software directly in a customer's data center with the AWS interface.
Google has been seemingly reluctant to embrace hybrid cloud, until now. It launched its hybrid Anthos suite in April, allowing users to take advantage of its Kubernetes service called Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), whether hosted in Google's (or any other) cloud or on premises.
The result? 2019 was the year of hybrid cloud, now supported by all 3 major cloud providers. Hybrid Kubernetes will be released in 2020.
This also means that the hybrid cloud competitive advantage that Microsoft had over other companies is eroding. This is a big deal, as Microsoft's cloud services are arguably less efficient than its competitors.
- Cloud-native security
Kubernetes is under a lot of pressure when it comes to security. Running a few processes on a slightly secure staging infrastructure was great, but moving the workload to production requires a whole new level of security.
A new wave of cybersecurity companies is emerging to address this need.
Developers and their teams have been transitioning to agile DevOps systems over the past decade. This means that code is updated frequently and developed rapidly. Everything changes with continuous software releases and continuous code development. So too must cybersecurity be continuous. The old approach of testing code in a controlled environment no longer works. Continuously updated software requires active cybersecurity.
A big trend is to leave cybersecurity in the hands of developers themselves. As production development becomes more and more in the hands of developers and less in the hands of businesses, it makes sense to create tools that allow developers to control and improve the security of their applications. Here are a few examples:
- After four years of existence, Snyk has raised $150 million to help developers find vulnerabilities in their code, containers, or a Kubernetes cluster.
- Anchore received $20 million in funding to create an “all-in-one container security platform designed to run on Kubernetes.”
The result? You'll hear a lot about tools that will help developers assess the security of their applications.
- Cutting-edge technology
We've heard a lot about the technological edge over the past couple of years. In a world where a car or a refrigerator is a computer, and the volume of data transfer is increasing, why not do computations close to the data instead of having everything happen in data centers? Performing some computations directly and pooling the results will reduce bandwidth requirements, increase security and privacy, and optimize the use of computations.
The issue is that the combination of these services, including Kubernetes, is not necessarily designed to run in computing environments outside of data centers.
So how will these services be handled?
2019 had many announcements on this issue, such as:
- Rancher, one of the leading commercial Kubernetes distribution vendors, has announced the release of k3s, a Kubernetes distribution “designed for workloads in unattended, remote environments or inside IoT devices.”.
- Virtual Kubelet, a system that allows you to extend Kubernetes to serverless server environments.
These are the four trends that will shape cloud services in 2020. It will be an exciting year.
