Advanced Computing in the Age of AI | Friday, March 29, 2024

Red Hat Foresees Sprawling Cloud, Container Specs in 2015 

"Cloud sprawl," the growing importance of the app developer and the maturing of the application container infrastructure are expected to drive enterprise operations in 2015, according to a year-end survey of cloud managers and strategists.

The list of emerging industry trends identified by Red Hat also focused on areas like application development along with OpenStack consolidation and the rise of the software-defined datacenter.

Among the trends foreseen by Red Hat is a "new age of 'Cloud Sprawl'" in the datacenter. The trend is seen as similar to the emergence of "virtualization as a way of addressing server sprawl and subsequently cloud computing addressed virtualization sprawl," argues Irshad Raihan, a Red Hat marketing manager for storage and big data. The coming "cloud sprawl" will result from "an explosion of numerous small projects housed in private, public and hybrid clouds that [will] contribute to a significantly larger risk exposure to the enterprise," Raihan warned.

Red Hat, which has a major stake in the success of application container technology via its Project Atomic initiative, is forecasting a maturing container ecosystem as the discussion shifts from use cases to industry standards.

"Instead of talking about the benefits of containers, the discussion will be on the standards that can help organization make their apps portable," predicted Krishnan Subramanian, director of strategy for Red hat's OpenShift cloud platform.

The leading candidates to become de facto industry standards for containerization and orchestration include, respectively, Docker and Kubernetes, Red Hat predicted. As the ecosystem matures, a more frequent question for cloud provider will be, "What's your container strategy?" predicted Ashesh Badani, vice president and general manager of OpenShift.

Linux containers will continue to gain traction within enterprises and be increasingly evaluated as an alternative to traditional hypervisor-based virtualization for new application workloads," added Joe Fernandes, OpenShift's director, product management. Fernandes also noted that a growing number of independent software vendors would begin offering applications packaged as portable container images.

Meanwhile, applications developers will seek more core services and applications within their cloud deployment platforms as adoption of platform-as-a-service offerings grow. One result of the shift to PaaS and containers could be the rise of "micro-services" as a better way to develop apps.

Meanwhile, as OpenStack and Linux container technologies begin to "collide" in 2015, greater consolidation in areas like workload orchestration (Heat, Kubernetes, Mesos and Yarn) is expected to accelerate. Mark Coggin, Red Hat's senior director for platform product marketing, said containerization of OpenStack services would help address "the installation complexities of OpenStack, and also facilitate the building of more complex solutions like high availability and fail-over, workload clustering and load balancing, high performance storage infrastructure and application autoscaling."

Raihan predicted that the rise of the software-defined datacenter means services will be consolidated and managed through the "hyper convergence of virtualization, storage, network and compute technologies."

Lastly, Red Hat predicted that competitive pressures from OpenStack, Linux containers and moves by major players like Microsoft would force VMware to open-source parts of its software-defined datacenter technology.

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