UPDATED 16:45 EDT / OCTOBER 17 2018

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

Wikibon forecast: Multicloud, software robots and Kubernetes will take off in 2019

As another tumultuous year in technology begins to wind down, it would be difficult to make any predictions for the coming year without focusing on the single major topic in the enterprise world: cloud computing.

Will enterprise models be public, private or multicloud? What role will containers play? And how will key drivers such as the Cloud Native Computing Foundation pursue the adoption of new technologies? And what about security in a world where breaches and data thefts seem to grow in magnitude on a weekly basis?

These and other subjects were recently wrapped into a series of annual predictions for 2019 made by Wikibon, the team of research analysts owned by the same company as SiliconANGLE. The forecasts are based on hundreds of interviews over the course of the year on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s video streaming studio.

Here’s a summary of what was covered this week in a special digital community presentation on theCUBE, which included a live CrowdChat session with a number of viewers and participants.

Zero-trust security takes off

“Security remains vexing to the cloud industry and the information technology industry overall,” said Peter Burris, chief research officer at Wikibon and host of theCUBE. “The notion of zero-trust security is going to be put in place that is fundamentally tied to the notion of sharing data.”

As the economic value of data becomes better understood by the technology community, including malicious actors, Wikibon analysts believe that zero-trust security will achieve widespread use by 2023. Zero-trust assumes that users requesting access from inside the network are just as untrustworthy as those seeking remote access and thus access requests are instead granted based on details about the particular users, their jobs and the security status of the device they’re using.

The two key technologies that will be essential in implementing this model will be software-defined networking and high-quality analytics, which will bring security and network disciplines closer together in the enterprise. “Instead of restricting access at the perimeter, you have to restrict access at the level of data,” Burris said.

True private cloud rules

Over two years ago, Wikibon introduced the concept that in a cloud-dominant world, not all data would move off-premises, but instead cloud services would have to move to the data. It called this idea the “true private cloud.”

“Nothing has occurred in the last couple of years that has suggested we were in any way wrong about this prediction,” Burris said.

Wikibon predicts that cloud will capture close to 15 percent of total information technology revenue in 2019 but foresees a shift in the spending model toward true private cloud technologies, especially at the edge where much of the data will reside.

“That will be the dominant model for how we think about computing over the course of the next few years,” Burris stated.

Kubernetes enables multicloud

The management of multicloud workflows has become increasingly more dependent on container technology, and Kubernetes has emerged as a top preference among IT administrators. Wikibon predicts that within the next five years, 90 percent of multicloud applications will use Kubernetes, further cementing its dominant position.

“Kubernetes is getting into all of the platforms, both public and private cloud,” said Stu Miniman, a Wikibon analyst and host of theCUBE. “We’ve been seeing the ascendance of Kubernetes as a fundamental, foundational piece of enabling this multicloud environment.”

Designed and engineered by Google LLC, Kubernetes is now freely available as an open-source platform. The appeal is in Kubernetes’ ability to eliminate the manual processes involved in deploying and scaling containers across public, private and hybrid cloud environments. Kubernetes continues to gain support and investment from industry giants, including VMware Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Google and Alibaba Holding Ltd., with several organizations looking to standardize Kubernetes as a default in container orchestration.

CNCF shapes cloud futures

One of the groups driving Kubernetes adoption has been the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. The foundation has emerged as a genuine clearinghouse for the latest advances in cloud technologies.

Earlier this year, CNCF issued Interactive Landscape 2.0 to help enterprises and developers chart a course through cloud-native technologies. The group also voted to accept Rook as its 15th hosted project in a nod toward support for persistent storage systems in Kubernetes clusters.

CNCF will continue to push into new cloud-related innovations, such as virtual Kubelets (agents that run on each node in the cluster) and KubeVirt (extends Kubernetes by adding resource types for virtual machines), according to a prediction from Wikibon analyst James Kobielus.

Companies such as Iguazio are also working with CNCF to define serverless standards in the multicloud environment. “They will expand the range of projects to include the frontier paradigms in microservices and cloud computing,” Kobielus said.

AI gets containerized at the edge

Kubernetes is also expected to play more of a role in the ecosystem of advanced orchestration services. Wikibon predicts that by 2021, Kubernetes will be used by more than half of enterprises deploying advanced big data and edge artificial intelligence applications.

“We’re going to see the big guys, like Google, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and others in the whole AI space begin to march around the need for a common DevOps framework such as Kubeflow, because that’s where many of their customers are going,” Kobielus said of the machine learning toolkit for Kubernetes.

Beyond the CNCF, organizations — including Cloud Foundry and the Eclipse Foundation — are actively working to standardize Kubernetes in support of a ubiquitous ecosystem. The efficiencies Kubernetes offers is now driving hybrid cloud adoption, according to a recent survey by Mesophere, as edge computing and AI trends drive progress in the retail sector. And for Kubernetes to have a truly successful ecosystem, cloud-native startups leveraging Kubernetes technology must thrive, according to Kelsey Hightower, co-chair of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and advocate for the Google Cloud Platform.

Multicloud spawns huge markets

Multicloud deployment is expected to be big — really big. “We predict that ultimately a sizable percentage of the marketplace, as much as 90 percent, will be taking a multicloud approach,” Burris said.

A report released by RightScale recently documented that 81 percent of enterprises are currently pursuing a multicloud strategy. And on the opening day at VMworld in August, VMware announced a set of products that highlighted its deep commitment to multicloud virtualization.

The expected preponderance of multicloud deployments is also predicted to generate a wave of innovation. Multicloud internetworking, orchestration services across clouds and data protection technologies are a few of the new markets the wave is expected to generate.

These new technologies will, in turn, become major markets as well. “We think that over the next decade, they will each grow into markets that are tens of billions if not hundreds of billions of dollars in size,” Burris said.

Software robots smooth cloud transition

The rise of “software robots” in the growing field of robotic process automation is expected to greatly simplify the process of automating workflows. The RPA market is predicted by Wikibon to grow from approximately $1 billion now to more than $10 billion by 2023.

The RPA market has already turned white-hot. Six-year-old startup UiPath Inc. recently reached “triple unicorn” status with a $3 billion valuation. AI’s role is also continuing to broaden, as evidenced by Automation Anywhere’s announcement earlier this year that it would open its online store to partner applications for its IQ Bot technology.

This will be essential to closing the global gap of available jobs and the number of qualified candidates to fill them. “RPA is going to become a fundamental approach to closing that gap,” said Dave Vellante, co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media and Wikibon and co-host of theCUBE. “These software robots are going to become increasingly easy to use.”

Matrix computing models emerge

The growth of a number of new technologies, generated in large part from workload deployments in the cloud ecosystem, will lead to the emergence of “matrix computing,” starting first in consumer markets next year and then making its way to the enterprise world by 2021, according to Wikibon.

Workloads such as AI, virtual reality, augmented reality and gaming are key to the emergence of matrix computing demand. “This is a move that’s happening very quickly indeed as new types of workload come on,” said Wikibon analyst David Floyer.

Matrix computing will also require sophisticated processors, such as low-power chips made by Arm Ltd., to handle complex workload deployments. “Arm is the key provider of these types of computing chips and computing models that are enabling this type of programming to happen,” Floyer said.

Here’s the complete video discussion of Wikibon’s 2019 cloud computing predictions:

Transcript from the community conversation CrowdChat

Photo: Aziz Acharki/Unsplash

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