INTELLIGENT CLOUD
Kamal Anand, Vice President, A10 Cloud
Business Unit.
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 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 as
a platinum member. All of this combined
pushes Kubernetes into more mainstream
deployments with continued growth in
large production workloads next year.
3. Analytics get an artificial
intelligence upgrade
Artificial intelligence is everywhere. It is
in our homes with Amazon Echo. And in
2018, it will be embedded more tightly in
IT analytics systems making IT proactive
versus reactive. Through predictive
analytics, IT and application owners
will receive actionable information and
recommendations. Add to that the ability
to automate their response, and the
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Currently
available in the
public cloud,
next year will
see serverless
computing start
to appear in
private cloud
deployments.
power of artificial intelligence becomes
more relevant.
Analytics systems will have insight
into the behaviour of the infrastructure,
applications and clients. It will recognize
anomalous performance or security
behaviour and when an application
or server is going to fail. Once that
behaviour is noticed, automation can kick
in to remediate the potential problem,
that is firing up another server or load
balancing the application. It is like your
infrastructure can say: Alexa, spin up
another server.
4. 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 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 of IT. And paying based
on a consumption model makes it more-
gentle on already strained budgets.
Currently available in the public
cloud, next year will see serverless
computing start to appear in private cloud
deployments as well. While it will not
become mainstream, wider adoption will
happen in the short term.
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.
5. Custom cloud
instances proliferate
As cloud adoption grows, compute
instance types will become further
segmented and optimised for specific use
cases, enabling improved performance
and new use cases. Next year will see
growth in the number of application-
specific instance types within clouds
– from big data and artificial intelligence-
optimised instances to high network
performance and very large memory
types. Custom optimised applications that
take advantage of these capabilities will
start appearing.
6. Kiss cloud security
concerns goodbye
Security is noticeably absent from our list
of cloud predictions. Why? Simple. It is
time to move on.
Yes, security is always important,
and even more so in the cloud. But it
is no longer the hindrance it was when
cloud was 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 is 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.
In the cloud world, things move
swiftly. That is just a snapshot of what we
think Doc and Marty will see if they take
the DeLorean into next year. There will
certainly be more big headlines in cloud
as more people find innovative ways to
consume it.
Issue 14
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS