Adoption of cross-cloud containers is increasing as developers push for an open cloud stack to avoid vendor lock-in, say IT leaders. However, in their efforts to embrace multi-cloud environments, organizations have to be mindful of avoiding the complexity of cloud sprawl. Here, three IT leaders share their predictions for the impact that containers and microservices will have in 2018
Rapid Kubernetes adoption forms the foundation for multi-cloud deployments: We predict runaway success of Kubernetes, but it is running away with the prize of adoption so fast that this may quickly be more of an observation than a prediction in 2018. So far, however, almost everybody is thinking of Kubernetes as a way of organizing and orchestrating computation in a cloud. Over the next year, we expect Kubernetes to more and more be the way that leading-edge companies organize and orchestrate computation across multiple clouds, both public and private. On premises computation is moving to containers and orchestration style at light speed, but when you can interchangeably schedule work anywhere that it makes sense to do so, you will see the real revolution. — MapR Chief Application Architect Ted Dunning
The lion’s share of new applications will be built with microservices architecture: Microservices architectures simplify the entire application development lifecycle, resulting in faster testing, higher quality, and more releases. Open source has paved the way for microservices architecture, with many components supporting continuous integration and delivery pipelines, microservices platforms, containers, container management and orchestration, container registry service, and serverless capability. Adoption of cross-cloud containers—such as Docker and Kubernetes—is on the rise, and developers demand an open cloud stack to avoid vendor lock-in. — Amit Zavery, Senior VP, Product Development, Oracle Cloud Platform & Middleware
Fear of cloud lock-in will result in cloud sprawl: As CIOs try to diversify investment in their compute providers, inclusive of their own on-premise capabilities, the diversification will result in data, services and algorithms spreading across multiple clouds. Finding information or code within a single cloud is tough enough. The data silos built from multiple clouds will be deep and far apart, pushing the cost of management onto humans that need to understand the infrastructure. — Satyen Sangani, Co-Founder and CEO of Alation