IT Trends for 2016 Part6 – What’s next?

Over the past 5 postings, I’ve talked about some trends that we have seen happening and gaining traction within the Cloud space. I’ve spoken of :

• Virtualization – Where established trends toward virtualization, particularly VMWare, have been challenged by a variety of newcomers, who’s market share continues to grow. Most notable here is OpenStack as a hypervisor. VMWare has challenged the threat of Azure, AWS, and true OpenStack by embracing it with a series of API’s meant to incorporate the on-prem Virtual DataCenter with those peers in the hybrid space.

• Storage – In the case of traditional storage, the trend has been to faster, with faster Ethernet or Fibre as interconnect, and of course, Solid State is becoming the norm in any reasonably high IO environment. But the biggest sea change is becoming that of Object based storage. Object really is a different approach, with replication, erasure encoding, and redundancy built-in.

• Software Defined Networking – Eating quite drastically into the data center space these days is SDN. The complexities in routing tables, and firewall rules are being addressed within the virtual data center by tools like ACI (Cisco) and NSX (VMWare). While port reduction isn’t quite the play here. The ability to segment a network via these rules far surpasses any physical switch’s capacities. In addition, these rules can be rolled out quite effectively, accurately, and with easy roll-back. I find that these two pieces are truly compelling to the maintaining and enhancing the elegance of the network, while reducing the complexities laid onto the physical switch environment.

• Containers – In the new world of DevOps, Containers, a way to disaggregate the application from the operating system, have proven yet another compelling way into the future. DevOps calls for the ability to update parts and pieces of an application, while Containers allow for the ability to scale the application, update it, and deploy it wherever and whenever you want.

• Serverless and MicroServices – Falling into the equation of DevOps, where small components compiled together make up for the entire application, put together as building-blocks make the whole of the application quite dynamic, and modifiable. While the “Serverless” piece, which is somewhat a misnomer (due to the fact that any workload must reside on some compute layer), are dynamic, movable, and reliant less on the hypervisor or location, than wherever the underlying architecture actually resides.

So… What’s next in the data center infrastructure? We’ve seen tools that allow the data center administrator to easily deploy workloads into a destination wherever that may be, we’ve seen gateways that bridge the gap from more traditional storage to object based, we’ve seen orchestration tools which allow for the rapid, consistent, and highly managed deployment of containers in the enterprise/cloud space, and we’ve seen a truly cross-platform approach to serverless/MicroService type of architecture which eases the use of a newer paradigm in the data center.

What we haven’t seen is a truly revolutionary unifier. For example, when VMWare became the juggernaut it did become, the virtualization platform became the tool that tied everything together. Regardless of your storage, compute (albeit X86 particularly) and network infrastructure, with VMWare as a platform, you had one reliable and practically bulletproof tool with which to deploy new workloads, manage existing platforms, essentially scale it up or down as required, and all through the ease of a simple management interface. However, with all these new technologies, will we have that glue? Will we have the ability to build entire architectures, and manage them easily? Will there be a level of fault tolerance; an equivalent to DRS, or Storage DRS? As we seek the new brass ring and poise ourselves onto the platforms of tomorrow, how will we approach these questions?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.