Alation - http://bit.ly/2DjLRpH

AI, MACHINE LEARNING, CLOUD LOCK -IN, MICROSERVICES, DATA LAKES AND M ORE

Satyen Sangani, co-founder and CEO of Alation

Microservices Will Result in Macro-confusion

• With the proliferation of containers and microservices, the cost of software creation, deployment and infrastructure will further decrease. Which services exist? How are they being used? How do we know if the service is deprecated? Who/what else is using the service?

Anexinet - http://bit.ly/2mXv31P

WHAT'S NEXT FOR PRIVATE CLOUD, CONTAINERS, SECURITY, M IXED REALITY AND QUANTUM COM PUTING AND ENCRYPTION

Ned Bellavance, Director, Cloud Solutions, Anexinet

Containers will show up in commercial software

• There has been a lot of hype around containers and how transformative they can be for an application. In almost all cases, the applications being deployed in containers are highly customized and developed in house or by a consulting firm. Now that container standards are settling down, largely thanks to the CNCF, and a de facto standard for container orchestration is emerging (kubernetes); it is becoming feasible to offer commercial software in a container format to enterprises. In the same way that virtual appliances became popular once enough enterprises had a virtualization platform, COTS applications in containers will rise in popularity when enough enterprises have a container platform.

Automic Software - http://bit.ly/2Ds05ZS

THE RETURN OF VENDOR LOCK -IN AND OTHER PREDICTIONS

Lucas Carlson, Vice President of Strategy at Automic Software

Container adoption will continue to be impressive.

• I write this prediction with egg on my face. In this space last year, I forecast that container hype will keep soaring while adoption will stay small. "Pitifully small" were my exact words. "Don't get me wrong," I wrote "It's not that I don't think containers won't take off. They just won't take off in 2017... Despite the hype, containers have a few more years before they are ready for the mainstream."

I was wrong. The aforementioned mandates from upper management to migrate to the cloud have put far more wind behind Docker's sails than I anticipated (even though I still maintain it's not always the right solution). That momentum is almost certain to continue and expand into 2018.

Cloud Foundry Foundation - http://bit.ly/2EWsqE4

WE ALL LIVE IN A KUBERNETES WORLD

First, it's all about Kubernetes.

• A container orchestration technology created and incubated at Google before spinning off to the stewardship of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (the sister organization to Cloud Foundry Foundation), this open source project has incredible industry momentum. The cloud application platform we support, Cloud Foundry, fully embraced Kubernetes in 2017. And by the time you read this, all three of the major public cloud providers -- AWS, GCP and Azure -- will have embraced Kubernetes and offer managed Kubernetes services. We even saw Docker radically pivot to support Kubernetes over its own solution, Swarm (the biggest surprise of 2017).

Is it safe to run Kubernetes in the enterprise?

• Google announced a partnership with VMware and Pivotal that validates enterprise adoption of Kubernetes in well-managed environments. It also provides access to Google cloud services via the Open Service Broker API. Are we seeing a repeat of Google's strategy to offer Android as an open source mobile OS to compete with Apple and the iPhone at a new place, the price of zero? It's early days in the cloud wars and smart people will watch Kubernetes closely in 2018.

Chip Childers, CTO, Cloud Foundry Foundation

CloudPassage - http://bit.ly/2mW5i1L

LOOKING AHEAD TO OBSTACLES AND IMPROVEMENTS FOR CLOUD M IGRATION AND SECURITY

Amit Gupta, VP of Product Management, CloudPassage

Containers will reach the mainstream and become the preferred form factor for greenfield applications.

• Container adoption saw a growth explosion in 2017, and the app development benefits have become apparent to all. Any security practitioner defining their security roadmap and not accounting for a comprehensive plan for container security is building a flawed, incomplete approach.

Datadog - http://bit.ly/2BghpuN

THE YEAR OF CONTEXT

Jason Yee, Technical Evangelist, Datadog

Context through abstraction

• We've seen the continued abstraction of systems from early configuration management defining individual servers, to tools like Hashicorp's Terraform defining clusters, to very high level abstraction in Kubernetes's service definitions. Along the way we've seen these abstractions handle relationships between applications and nodes. In 2018, we'll continue to see growing adoption of container and orchestration technologies like Docker and Kubernetes. And with it, we will see new abstractions that define the relationships between systems and provide context for what those systems should do and how they should behave.

Hedvig - http://bit.ly/2Dkusxp

EASY ENTERPRISE CROSS -CLOUD ARCHITECTURES AND MORE IN 20 18

Avinash Lakshman, CEO and Co-founder of Hedvig

Like Docker for containers, Kubernetes becomes the de facto cloud orchestrator

• I could easily have made this prediction last year and it would be just as true. The recent embrace of Kubernetes across the industry - including Microsoft Azure,Docker, and Mesosphere DC/OS - shows that the open-source container orchestration system has proven its effectiveness in providing simpler cloud deployment, better scaling, and more efficient management. It is already baked in to OpenShift and other private label solutions. In 2018, the IT world will become conversant, if not fluent, in Kubernetes, its concepts and terminology and start to expand inside enterprises and clouds.

Containers drive multi-cloud adoption

• One of the barriers to multi-cloud architectures is portability of workloads. As more enterprises gain experience developing and delivering applications that run in containers, it opens a new level of cross-cloud capability that in 2018 will mean these organizations can more easily spin up workloads in the cloud - or clouds - of their choice. This will make is possible to place and run applications where it makes the most sense based on a number of factors, including economics and locality.

Lightbend, Inc. - http://bit.ly/2mQpstc

JAVA EE GOES CLOUD NATIVE IN 2018 WITH REACTIVE

• Containers and cloud-native often presume bare-metal servers, no JVM, and polyglot development. As cloud-native has taken flight as the way the big tech companies and startups in Silicon Valley build new distributed applications, there have been many unanswered questions from the Java community about how to best participate in this new world of modern application design and operations.

• Here's why this will change in 2018 and beyond. First, the hardening of microservices frameworks and architectures--and their creeping into Java EE via MicroProfiles--is making it possible for enterprises to target legacy Java monoliths, to deconstruct them as microservices and run them in the cloud. This will be a huge disruptive force as the massive installed base of Java shops in all industries target these previously inflexible systems and make them more flexible with the cloud-native development styles happening with the net new systems and applications that are being designed in enterprise. The container format itself has matured. The writing's on the wall and near consensus opinion is out that Kubernetes has won at the orchestration layer. So the operational predictability that Kubernetes and containers provide at the server / cluster infrastructure level, and the elasticity, resilience and responsiveness of Reactive system design at the application infrastructure level are the future. And the next big domino that will fall in this evolution will be microservices being pointed at the inflexible Java monolithic applications in production at enterprises that have--to date--felt sidelined in the move to the cloud, but who now have a clear path.

Mark Brewer is the CEO of Lightbend, Inc.

ManageEngine - http://bit.ly/2rnKTrc

CONTAINERIZATION TO CONTINUE ITS UPWARD TREND

Arun Balachandran, Senior Product Analyst, ManageEngine

Containers continue to gain importance

• The rise of cloud computing has also given rise to the problem of public cloud vendor lock-in. To counter this problem, some CIOs are looking at multi-vendor strategies and containers for portability. If an enterprise is likely to move essential applications and processing from cloud to cloud or platform to platform, then containers hold the most potential. All major cloud providers now support containers.

Mirantis - http://bit.ly/2mXfNCd

CONTAINERS WILL DRIVE MASSIVE SHIFT IN HOW COMPANIES DO BUSINESS

Boris Renski, Co-Founder and CMO, Mirantis

Containerizing VNFs will become a thing

• The telco space is big on standards. Nobody moves until everybody moves. So while the benefits of containerizing VNFs (vs. virtualizing network functions) are broadly understood and accepted, the space has been nascent while companies waited for standards to appear.

• This year, Kubernetes and its surrounding ecosystem of open projects have provided the telco sector that security. Kubernetes is the orchestrator, Helm is the Kubernetes Package Manager, and with those areas no longer in flux, next year we'll see VNF vendors and telcos starting to move on containerization.

• We've already seen the beginning of this process this year with the AT&T announcement about containerizing OpenStack, but that's the NFV Infrastructure level; the really exciting stuff will be happening at the VNF level next year, starting with containerization of vIMS and video delivery (transcoding, packaging etc.).

NeuVector - http://bit.ly/2FX1e9w

CONTAINERS , KUBERNETES, AND SECURITY

Fei Huang, CEO, NeuVector

Enterprises migrate to containers in production - at the edge, and cautiously.

• Virtually all enterprises will have a container project in production by the end of 2018. However, most of these will be small deployments used to first explore the technologies, and then refine the pipeline from there. Larger issues around processes, people, and automation will prevent many enterprises from moving into containers at a large scale. Early adopters in the usual industries such as financial services will try to move quickly, but typical laggards like consumer goods and retail will find that they can benefit more quickly from containers and try to move into them aggressively.

The first multi-cloud container deployments will go into production.

• Trust in services such as AWS will remain high, but enterprises will always be concerned about vendor lock-in. The abstraction provided by containers and their orchestration tools makes it possible - and in some cases preferable - to be able to deploy services across multiple clouds, and this is exactly what enterprises will do more of in the coming year.

Platform9 - http://bit.ly/2DsaOnm

INNOVATING WHAT WE HAVE

Sirish Raghuram, CEO and Co-Founder, Platform9

Kubernetes is dead. Long live Kubernetes.

• It's no secret that Kubernetes is the leading container orchestration platform. As Platform9 found in a recent survey conducted at CloudNativeCon + KubeConAustin, Kubernetes usage dwarfs competing solutions by greater than 3:1.

• While adoption has soared, Kubernetes has now reached a local maxima - forcing vendors to innovate at a faster clip to stay ahead of the competition, especially from public clouds, in the year ahead. The value of the base Kubernetes platform will go to zero dollars in 2018 as the market becomes overcrowded with managed Kubernetes solutions. To succeed, Kubernetes solutions will need to offer capabilities that are differentiated from the base platform - such as those offering serverless as an easier onramp to use Kubernetes at scale.

Red Hat - http://bit.ly/2DRvcLs

VIRTUALIZATION, CONTAINERS, CLOUD, IOT, SECURITY, AI AND M ORE

Gunnar Hellekson is the Director of Product Management for Red HatThe merging of containers and virtualization

• It's all about containers in 2018 -- and virtual machines running on containers will gain momentum in the new year as Kubernetes continues to evolve. It's important to remember, however, that virtualization and containers are not competitive, but rather complement one another. I expect we will continue to see the vast majority of containerized infrastructures operating on hypervisors, with early adopters actually merging the two with Kubernetes.

"Hybrid by default" becomes the new operations mantra

• The worlds of containers and OpenStack will blend: Increased collaboration across OpenStack, Kubernetes and other key open source projects, driven by the customer need to get to a unified fabric for physical, virtual and containers, will bring compelling benefits by reducing redundancies and leveraging the ecosystem. Additionally, I predict private cloud efforts will gain further momentum in 2018 driven by application modernization efforts, resulting in "hybrid cloud by default" to become the standard operating procedure for enterprises.

Radhesh Balakrishnan is the global leader for OpenStack at Red Hat

SUSE - http://bit.ly/2DO9NCN

OPEN SOURCE IN 2018: CONTAINERS, MULTI -CLOUD AND COLLABORATION

Thomas Di Giacomo, Chief Technology Officer, SUSE

Containers technology will take off, bringing DevOps success

• Container technology made huge inroads in 2017 and that success will only grow: Forrester predicts that the application containers market is likely to grow by 40 percent by 2020. In 2018, organizations will focus on optimizing their use of containers in the enterprise. This means adopting more container management and orchestration tools to scale extensive container deployments. For example, Kubernetes is allowing organizations to maximize their processing time and storage space. With a refined container strategy in place, developers and organizations will be able to further streamline their delivery/management processes, leading to a DevOps success story, by starting to forget about the underlying infrastructure, including that it runs containers.

Tufin - http://bit.ly/2DPJpsn

CONTAINERIZATION RISES

Reuven Harrison, CTO and Co-Founder of Tufin

The Rise of Containers and Micro-Services

• With a steadily increasing use of containers in enterprises, we believe that 2018 will see the notion of segmentation extend from the realm of the network to the realm of micro-services.

• The continual decoupling of applications from infrastructure will enable new architectures and methodologies which will transform the way enterprisers practice cybersecurity. Two leading trends in this area are immutable infrastructure and serverless architectures.

• Immutable infrastructure has already been established as a way to improve agility and security and we expect this trend to continue in 2018 and beyond. We'll also see enterprises begin to invest in serverless architectures.

Usermind - http://bit.ly/2mUMlwi

CIOS MUST LEAD IN CLIMBING THE LEARNING CURVE OF CONTAINER ORCHESTRATION

David Talby, CTO, Usermind

Tightened Security

• Even the more advanced container technology such as Docker and Kubernetes are not inherently secure. Security controls are required at multiple levels - network isolation, storage encryption, key management, role based access, audit logs and many others. Additionally, regulated industries like healthcare, education and finance will require stricter compliance. Security, privacy and compliance must be baked into the architecture from the ground up. Point solutions and "quick fixes" don't work. Controls also have to consider the entire technology stack since vulnerabilities often exist where multiple systems were designed separately with different security assumptions. Even if the API connects, the security protocol may not translate.

More Container Services

• Engineering shops will leverage the managed container services that all major cloud providers now offer, even though that may increase lock-in to cloud providers. Consider carefully the benefits of using a cloud provider's managed container service, versus rolling a Kerberos deployment. Since Docker and Kerberos will become core technologies for which you'll have good in-house knowledge, and since there are reusable, standard scripts to deploy them, this is an opportunity to be (almost) completely cloud-agnostic.

READ 280+ EXPERT PREDICTIONS AT http://bit.ly/2DQi2OT