DEVOPSdigest

DevOps experts — analysts and consultants, users and the top vendors — offer thoughtful, insightful, and sometimes controversial predictions on how DevOps and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2018. Part 5 covers APIs and containers.

Start with 2018 DevOps Predictions - Part 1

Start with 2018 DevOps Predictions - Part 2

Start with 2018 DevOps Predictions - Part 3

Start with 2018 DevOps Predictions - Part 4

API: EVERYONE WILL BE A DEVELOPER

RESTful APIs are far simpler to use than Web Services or the tightly coupled, coded APIs of the past, but they are still not as easy to use as they should be. We predict increasingly mature no-code approaches to API construction and consumption, as integration becomes a task that anyone in the organization can tackle.
Jason Bloomberg
President, Intellyx

In 2018, everyone will be a developer. If every walk of life is being affected by software, then every person will need to manipulate code. APIs are both the glue and the solution — they break down the barrier between people who want to make software do things and their inability to code. Tools that make working with APIs easier will only grow more popular.
Abhinav Asthana
CEO, Postman

Digital leaders will use open platforms and APIs in greater numbers to integrate information, people and processes across their extended value chain. These connections will lay the foundation for faster business flows and new digital products and services. 2018 will be all about maximizing the use of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to enable diverse applications to connect and share data. Digital leaders will use API-led integration to combine services and expose information in ways that deliver unprecedented customer and business value. They are already finding that within days and without lots of coding, they can roll out service innovations, revamp internal processes, enliven customer interactions, extend their digital reach, and enable entirely new business models.
Chris Wiborg
VP of Product Marketing, Alfresco Software

API EVOLUTION

APIs will cease to exist in a single namespace, but will instead be accessed through dynamically-calculated locations that transcend traditional DNS. Rather than rely on inherently inefficient static logic that informs basic DNS resource discovery (e.g. geo-based, hop-optimized, etc.), API providers will use cloud-native applications to ensure that their services are not just 100 percent available, but delivered at a level of quality that finally allows microservice architecture to emerge from Next Big Thing and become Today's Big Thing.
Simon Jones
Evangelist, Cedexis

API: ADDING TECHNICAL DEBT

There is an overwhelming proliferation of products, practices, and technology options within the API ecosystem. It will be critical for business and technology leaders to understand how these options fit into their overall digital transformation. Leaders who are unable to separate fact from fiction when it comes to the capabilities promised by these options, will risk adding another form of technical debt to their organization.
Matt Rossi
Director of Technnology, Janeiro Digital

KUBERNETES TAKES CENTER STAGE

Kubernetes will catch fire. Kubernetes, the open-source system for automating deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications, has been a rising star over the past few years. In 2018, we will see its popularity take center stage. Kubernetes implementation by Spark and HDFS users will promote these technologies to work more cohesively together in the new year. In turn, the need for standardizing the IT infrastructure environment is now being fulfilled with Kubernetes. Developers are being enabled with fast access to data across distributed uses of HDFS and soon to be Spark. This will all propel adoption and reduce costs by enabling IT organizations to focus more effort on building and managing applications.
Ash Munshi
CEO, Pepperdata

KUBERNETES ENABLES PAAS

Kubernetes will become the standard for cluster computing, and finally make Platform as a Service (PaaS) possible. More companies will join the project and provide services on top of the OSS. Extensions will be made available by cloud providers and software companies to make it easier to run applications in the cloud … but this will also create lock-in.
Carlos Sanchez
Software Engineer, CloudBees

KUBERNETES SOLVES BIG DATA CHALLENGES

Kubernetes has won the container orchestration wars — it's clearly the de facto standard for stateless applications (such as web servers) and microservices. But what about Big Data and stateful applications? Over the next year, Kubernetes will address challenges in using the platform for long running, distributed, multi-services Big Data applications: including persistent storage, security, performance, and several other operational requirements. Big Data applications break the typical assumptions for container orchestration. The blind placement of individual services into containers will lead to all sorts of problems. Kubernetes will address these issues as they continue to see growing adoption in 2018.
Anant Chintamaneni
VP of Product, BlueData

CONTAINERS IN PRODUCTION

We'll see more containers run in production environments. Containers are a core pillar of DevOps but in 2018, they'll hit a tipping point where we'll see more developers running containers into production than not. Kubernetes will be a key part of this process in helping make containers production grade.
Mark Pundsack
Head of Product, GitLab

CONTAINERS MODERNIZE TRADITIONAL APPLICATIONS

Over the course of the last year, we have seen many organizations bring Dev and IT Operations together using container technology and a Dev Ops approach for green field applications using a Microservices architecture pattern. 2018 will be about using containers to modernize traditional applications, leveraging the significant cost savings coming from the higher workload density enabled by containers to innovate and create business value on top of existing software assets. Further collaboration will be possible between developers and IT Operations by integrating security best practices and technology into the process, enabling teams to create a single secure software supply chain to deliver new innovations faster, more securely, and across a broader application portfolio.
Patrick Chanezon
Chief Developer Advocate, Docker

DEVOPS SIMPLIFIES NETWORK MANAGEMENT

The trend of applying DevOps to globally-dispersed networks will continue, and enterprises will realize a new benefit of simplification. Enterprise networks often connect a wide range of sites spanning from small remote offices to private data centers to mobile work sites to cloud-based applications. The ideal platform for deploying network functions at these locations varies from bare metal to virtualized servers to mobile appliances to multi-cloud infrastructure. Agent-based tools have matured to support all of these platforms with consistent abstraction. Now enterprises can realize the operational benefits of simplified management of heterogeneous network deployments.
Erik Thoen
Director, Product Management, 128 Technology

CONTINUOUS DELIVERY OF NETWORKING

In 2018, you will see more demands placed on the continuous delivery of changes to networking setups, due to pressure from containerization, distributed systems and security needs.
Nigel Kersten
Chief Technical Strategist, Puppet

Check back tomorrow for Part 6

Read 2018 DevOps Predictions - Part 6, covering analytics and data.