DEVOPSdigest

As part of the 2022 DevOps Predictions list, DEVOPSdigest asked industry experts — from analysts and consultants to users and the top vendors — how they think cloud will evolve and impact DevOps in 2022. This is Part 2.

Start with: 2022 DevOps Predictions for Cloud - Part 1

INCREASED DEMAND FOR DISTRIBUTED CLOUD

In 2022, we will see the popularity of distributed cloud grow significantly. By implementing distributed clouds, companies can leverage the power of cloud computing within public clouds, private data centers, and edge locations to deliver greater business value with new use cases previously not feasible. There will be an increased demand for open distributed cloud and it will become a standard in the future.
Bhaskar Gorti
CEO, Platform9(link is external)

COMPOSABILITY WILL BE KEY TREND

Leveraging software defined components, composability removes the need to manage the underlying infrastructure and eliminates the need to reconfigure physical assets like servers, storage and connectivity based on changes in the workload. With composable IT, enterprises are able to manage their applications or services through a single unified control plane that can span multiple clouds, on-premises and all the way to the edge. That's why today's globally distributed enterprises will embrace the concept of composability — not just for their on-premises infrastructures but also for their multi-cloud and edge deployments. Looking at architectures and how they're evolving, enterprises will move away from monolithic architectures, toward building applications and infrastructures from component parts with well-defined interfaces. Businesses will continue to think about agility and simplicity when it comes to composing the infrastructure of technology stacks to achieve business goals — so the notion of composable businesses and applications will be a key trend.
Rahul Pradhan
Head of Product and Engineering, Cloud Databases, Couchbase(link is external)

Cloud-native apps go to the edge

With the help of the CNCF, enterprises have made major progress in adopting cloud-native technologies in public, private and hybrid cloud environments. In 2022, enterprises will express growing interest in bringing cloud-native apps to the edge, which will benefit from improved portability and agility. However, for open source CNCF projects to work, they require broad standardization of both software and hardware. To support the transition of cloud-native apps to the edge, industry leaders in edge software and edge hardware will ramp up efforts to achieve greater standardization.
Gary Ogasawara
CTO, Cloudian(link is external)

INCREASE USE OF Open Source

For successful companies with a proprietary software product, it's just a matter of time before a competitor with an open source offering will appear in the market segment. To adapt and continue to do business successfully, proprietary providers will need to switch their business model to one suited for open source software, for example — a DevOps Platform. We'll also see the acceleration off digital-first and cloud native companies, leading to a worldwide boom in open source. The cloud helped accelerate the adoption of open source software because it allowed companies to scale up without incurring large costs in software licensing. As a result, developers and organizations continue to adopt and contribute to open source projects more and more due to its low entry barrier, accessibility, and cost. The acceleration of digital-first and cloud native companies will increase the use of open source and increase the size of the open source community worldwide.
Cesar Saavedra
Technical Marketing Manager, GitLab(link is external)

The ultimate fate of this innovation is confirmed by a recent survey by Tidelift that found that 68% of organizations recently turned to open source during the economic downturn to help them save time and money. Open-source software is a great way to be flexible, cheaper and avoid possible costly vendor lock-in. Faster time-to-market along with increased security are important considerations. Open-source projects are usually audited by many different contributors, leading to increased code quality and no secret backdoors or vulnerabilities.
Kash Shaikh
CEO and President, Virtana(link is external)

Visual Collaboration Tames Cloud Chaos

In the first six months of 2021, cloud app adoption increased 22%, with the average company using 805 distinct apps and cloud services, 97% of which were unmanaged. As cloud adoption increases and the cloud becomes more complex in 2022, tools to help developers understand and organize their cloud environment will become necessary and take over the market. Visual solutions that help them see their cloud infrastructures, detect and troubleshoot outages, and make changes in real-time will emerge as a better way to tame the cloud chaos — and make cloud management via spreadsheets obsolete.
Dan Lawyer
Chief Product Officer, Lucid Software(link is external)

Serverless Drives DevOps

Accelerating DevOps productivity not only adopts agile processes and opens culture in organizations, but it also impacts how individual developers can modernize business applications on-demand across the hybrid cloud. Operators need to optimize infrastructure resources along with modern applications. Serverless functions are driving the fast adoption of DevOps development and deployment practices. In 2022, developers must understand how serverless capabilities are specified using a combination of cloud computing, data infrastructure, and function-oriented programming. IT Ops teams also need to consider resource optimization (memory and CPU) and high-performance boot and first-response times in both development and production environments for faster time-to-market/service for adopting serverless functions platforms successfully.
Daniel Oh
Senior Principal Technical Marketing Manager, Red Hat(link is external)
and DevOps Institute Ambassador(link is external)

PAAS DRIVES DEVOPS

Platform as a Service is the future when it comes to cloud technologies. Virtual machines are just a temporary stop on the road to the cloud. As you see people adopt cloud-based services, they also have to build more disciplined development and deployment processes. It's too easy to mess something up, and recovery can be more difficult, depending on the service. With this in mind, you're going to see a lot more DevOps adoption being driven by platform adoption.
Grant Fritchey
Product Advocate, Redgate(link is external)

Check back next week for 2022 DevSecOps Predictions.