Datacenter Infrastructure & Operations Technology Trends for 2019 & beyond

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Gartner Research rolled out their “Top 10 Trends Impacting Infrastructure & Operations for 2019” report a few months ago. The full report can be found here[1] . My goal for this blog post is to introduce these trends to the reader and to examine the potential impact of their recommendations from an enterprise infrastructure standpoint.

# 1: Serverless Computing 

I have posted a lot of content on serverless over the last few months on this blog. Gartner rightly recognizes Serverless computing as the most disruptive trend encompassing infrastructure, development, and operations. Serverless Platforms are closely tied to new architecture patterns and technologies such as Microservices and Containers.  Developers can easily code, deploy and operate Serverless applications that are production-ready from the get-go – without having to be Kubernetes experts. As FaaS frameworks such as Fission are able to run on any Kubernetes infrastructure, they deliver far more flexibility than Lambda which only runs on AWS. 

# 2: Artificial Intelligence for Infrastructure & Operations Management

As Cloud Native architectures begin to grow in deployments with 2019 being the breakout year, the industry will witness a range of infrastructure to maintain, provision and manage. This means that as infrastructure deployments grow, the number of administrators, SREs should stay low to ensure cost-efficient deployments. Customers should consider solutions that have been architected from the ground up to reduce infrastructure management & operations cost while ensuring 24X7 uptime for hybrid clouds. Consider integrated platforms which provide managed IaaS, CMP and Monitoring costs for enterprise customers. Over the next two years, expect more AI-related infrastructure management capabilities.

# 3: Network Agility 

Software Defined Networking has been a huge part of building an agile infrastructure. I see network agility impacting the Datacenter in six ways –

• Just in time provisioning of VMs and Application Stacks by lines of business developers and IT admins leading to reduced Capex and Opex
• API based access to complex networking constructs and elements. Such access to network variables is being provided right from the development stage thus resulting in more efficient network testing. For example, CI/CD tools such as Spinnaker offer a deep understanding of the different containers, VMs and security groups present in the deployment architecture
• On the fly allocation of resources and on demand. No need for any kind of static provisioning
• Integration with a host of popular automation and config management tools such as Ansible, Puppet, and SaltStack.
• Ease of provisioning the network based on policy across automated configuration tools, ability to rapidly provision VMs and other applications
• The ability to confer custom network policies to different tenet users and applications while maintaining a high degree of security needed in a multitenant architecture

# 4: Death of the Datacenter

I take issue with this prediction. Gartner forecasts that, by 2025, 80% of all enterprises will shut down their traditional data centers. In fact, Gartner claims that 10% of organizations already have. This isn’t what we are seeing. Organizations will have workloads in the public cloud and on-prem. Amazon’s announcement of an on-prem solution further validates that there are significant investments to be made on-prem. The combination of both – the hybrid cloud – will become the dominant infrastructure model in 2018 and beyond. We see an enterprise cloud maturity model applicable to firms either looking at cloud computing as a way of saving costs or creating new business models leveraging the inherent flexibility in the cloud-native paradigm. 

# 5: Edge Computing 

Edge computing is perhaps the hottest and the most durable I&O trend. While edge use cases span nearly every large vertical, the hard universal challenge seems to be the creation of a robust unified architecture that spans BOTH the edge & the datacenter. Architecture silos are much a cause of technical debt as are data & process silos. Platform9 has built both IaaS and Container platforms that are being leveraged across industries such as Retail and High technology to provide robust support for both edge and datacenter workloads. 

# 6: Digital Diversity Management 

Whatever the underlying cloud or infrastructure provider is, Platform9 has provided the ability to support diverse digital application management. We provide this by enabling the rapid creation of hybrid clouds that provide a unified experience across four diverse areas:

1. A single view of all types of infrastructure: servers, VMs, Containers, storage, and network – across all VM providers and private/public clouds, all the cloud regions and the tenants across these regions. And the ability to inventory & monitor services across a diverse global infrastructure
2. A single way for Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) to administer hybrid infrastructure across critical areas such as security & identity management
3. Unified & open API for both developers and operations to perform lifecycle management, business capability deployment and easy integrations with point tools or management processes
4. Continuous monitoring across all of the different cloud regions and environments 

We find that the most difficult thing about running a diverse global cloud management platform is the setup, installation, configuration, and Day 2 operations. As veterans of the cloud landscape, we have seen enterprises take months (sometimes years!) of round the clock professional services and consulting in order to get a hybrid cloud running across even a relatively small fleet of data centers and cloud providers. It is time for the industry to relook its approach to this key area.

#7: New Roles Within I&O 

Gartner feels that starting 2019 – the I&O infrastructure of the future much evolve capabilities to broker, support and govern new kinds of services.  

Key SRE capabilities that accommodate this trend include –

1. the ability to grow the deployment footprint dynamically (Scale-up)  as well as to decrease the footprint (Scale-down) by brokering across clouds – both private & public
2. the ability to gracefully handle failures across service tiers that can disrupt application availability
3. the ability to accommodate large development teams by ensuring that components themselves provide loose coupling
4. the ability to work with virtually any kind of infrastructure (compute, storage and network) implementation and to be able to govern costs across the globe

#8: SaaS Denial

Gartner states that – “Most IT professionals are still heavily focused on delivery and support of IaaS and PaaS solutions. The shift to SaaS must be underpinned by robust I&O support. I&O staff need to gain insight into SaaS from a security and compliance perspective, and offer the enterprise integration and service delivery capabilities that their business expects.” 

Managed IaaS & Kubernetes platforms allow enterprises to run hybrid clouds and container-based applications on Kubernetes instantly, anywhere, reduce IT operational overhead and accelerate adoption and time to value with containers. It is the industry’s only SaaS-managed Kubernetes solution that is infrastructure agnostic, working across any public cloud or on-premises infrastructure. This fully-managed service eliminates the operational complexity in scaling Kubernetes for enterprise workloads by delivering it as a Service — with deployments, monitoring, upgrades, fault tolerance, and troubleshooting — all handled automatically, and backed by a 24x7x365 SLA.

#9: Talent Management Becomes Critical 

The foremost characteristic of a Hybrid Cloud Architecture is the ability to dynamically support applications across massive numbers of users, large development organizations & highly distributed operations teams. This requirement is even more critical when one considers that cloud computing is inherently multi-tenant & global in nature. Gartner rightly feels that not only are they needed I&O technical skills wider but also more collaborative in nature to make hybrid infrastructure successfully. Accordingly, SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) skills, automation engineering, stateless application development, and DevOps will be in demand in the coming years. Management teams partner with and enable I&O personnel to cultivate these skills.

#10: Global Infrastructure Enablement 

Gartner rightly calls out the fact that enterprise infrastructure has a global footprint and that I&O leaders need to identify the right partners from an ecosystem point. At the same time, public cloud providers have propagated a vision of ‘cloud’ as the ultimate destination. In reality, enterprises have struggled with the desire to consume both the agility and speed of cloud computing not just on public clouds, but also while using their existing infrastructure, or infrastructure located at edge locations, or a combination thereof – at a global scale.  At Platform9, we feel that cloud is not where your apps are hosted, but rather it is about the experience of how compute services are provisioned and operated at global scale to accelerate innovation and enable business value, regardless of where infrastructure lives. While local regulations from a data and compliance standpoint need to be respected, the SaaS delivery model has been proven at a global scale as reliable, efficient and as promoting developer/infrastructure self-service.

Conclusion

Recent wins from large enterprises who have chosen prove the growing adoption of hybrid cloud in enterprises, as Fortune 500 organizations modernize their applications and infrastructure in order to enable their cloud journeys and stay competitive in today’s digital economy. 

References

[1] https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/top-10-trends-impacting-infrastructure-and-operations-for-2019/ .