2020 Storylines In Cloud, IoT and beyond

A very happy new year to readers of this blog and supporters of Rishidot Research. As we enter a new decade with maturity in cloud services offered by various cloud providers and newer services focussed on IoT and AI becoming a hot topic, it is time to talk about what we expect to see this year in the technology space. This first blog post of the year is dedicated to discussing the trends we expect to see in the industry.

Move over Day 1 hype, Day 2 reality matters

After all the hype about new cloud services, Kubernetes, Serverless, etc, people are slowly moving over from the hype surrounding Day 1 technologies to the harsh realities of Day 2. After buying up multiple cloud services from a single cloud provider, they are wondering where is the integration between their services to make their life on Day 2 better. More developers are waking up to the reality that a flashy new service on Day 1 could easily turn into an operations nightmare on Day 2. The realization by developers that the flashy new Serverless service requires managing the underlying storage and other DevOps tasks makes them wonder what about Day 2.

2020 will be the year when the industry conversations will shift towards Day 2 issues. Cloud providers are seeing this. Whether the tone of AWS re:invent in 2019 or the announcements like Azure Arc, the Day 2 realities are taken seriously by the cloud providers. Other larger companies like IBM-Red Hat and VMware will increase their focus on Day 2 issues. Expect to see more startups hitting the newswire talking about Day 2 issues than a shiny new toy technology. It is time people wake up from the illusion that cloud services imply NoOps and focus on Day 2. Cloud services change the operations model by bringing in abstractions and giving hooks at a higher level than traditional IT. As organizations embrace cloud services, they should understand the various hooks that are provided by these services (either through APIs or SDKs) and use intelligent automation (automation fed by predictive analytics or AIOps in the marketing lingo) to optimize the delivery pipeline.

Developers wake up to Day 2 too

Even developers are waking up to Day 2 issues. Whether it is about realizing the limitations of database technologies built for traditional web applications or managing the complexity associated with Microservices architecture, developers are also moving beyond the Day 1 marketing hype to Day 2 reality. They are realizing that traditional databases used for web applications are too limited for their Microservices applications and the streaming technologies of the last decade add unnecessary complexity. They are looking for SQL databases built ground up with cloud-native technologies or streaming APIs that provide them the flexibility to bring together various data sources without additional resource or operations overhead.

Edge Computing and IoT extends the IT perimeter making it more fluid

In Dec of 2009, I wrote a position paper talking about a move from a client-service-like model of cloud to a more P2P model. We are nowhere closer to have a fluid computing model with a P2P architecture but the innovations in Edge Computing and IoT in the last few years are moving us closer to such a reality. Edge computing and IoT with centralized cloud services in the mixture is slowly nudging us in the path towards a more fluid computing architecture. 2020 is going to further advance this trend. Even though 2020 may not bring some of the innovations listed below to reality, it will launch us towards a decade where we will end up with a more fluid computing architecture. We are going to see:

• More autonomous management solutions that will make it easy to tackle fluid computing architectures
• A marriage between predictive analytics and automation becoming deeper in solving some of the operational problems large organizations face
• Increased intelligent automation bringing in scale using smaller operations teams than what we have today in IT organizations
• A realization that security and privacy first approach to IoT is the necessary foundation of fluid computing architectures

Developers are going to build more disposable applications and such a shift towards smaller distributed applications is critical to take advantage of the fluid compute infrastructure underneath. At the end of this decade, pushing data to the cloud for processing will be considered a legacy approach. Disposable applications will be the mantra for Developers from 2020 onwards and it will grow loud as the decade progresses.

And, Google Cloud will be there by the end of the decade. Watch out for the new episode of Modern Enterprise Podcast where I discuss this topic with a Xoogler.

If you thought cloud computing made the last decade interesting, wait for AI, Edge, and IoT making this decade more interesting as the adoption of newer technologies throws up some unique challenges requiring innovative solutions. A very happy 2020 to all of you.