Virtualization is an unstoppable trend under which applications become progressively more abstracted and independent from the underlying platforms on which their services execute.

It’s now a well-established practice for enhancing the scalability, portability and efficiency of information technology assets. It supports flexible partitioning, aggregation and composition of compute, storage, memory and bandwidth within and across diverse networks, clouds, clusters, servers and other platforms.

All this enables legacy assets to deliver value alongside the newest platforms for the remainder of their useful lives.

As we push more deeply into the 21^st century, virtualization is providing a core paradigm for development, deployment and management of multiclouds as well as the microservices-based apps that run on them. The set of practices that now falls under the heading of virtualization continues to broaden in scope and sophistication. The term virtualization now covers such mainstream enterprise cloud use cases as:

• Managing virtual machines over heterogeneous bare-metal platforms
• Containerizing cloud applications for distributed orchestration over Kubernetes
• Using functional programming to stand up serverless cloud applications
• Distributing compute and storage resources across software-defined data centers, and providing an abstraction layer for centralized monitoring, management and control of orchestrated microservices running across public clouds and on-premises environments

As Wikibon has been discussing in our market research, the chief trends in this arena are that virtualization technology is steadily:

• Reaching the cloud’s edges, as next-generation software-defined data center platforms include gateways, hubs, embedded runtimes and other devices on the “internet of things”
• Extending up the cloud application stack, as more commercial platforms optimize the running of containers and Kubernetes inside virtual machines
• Converging cloud development abstractions, as next-generation platforms include lightweight, open-source virtual machine monitors that support creation and management of secure multitenant containers and serverless functions
• Simplifying access to multicloud infrastructure and application resources from unified service-brokering catalogs, thereby enabling operations teams to govern resource access and enforce security, deployment and business policies across multicloud environments
• Enabling more seamless programming of cloud services, as more tooling supports unified development of complex orchestrated apps through declarative infrastructure-as-code
• Serving as the foundation for continuous integration and deployment of application and infrastructure functionality throughout multiclouds, providing AI-driven DevOps tools that automate code testing, troubleshooting, release and governance

To learn more about what’s going on in virtualization, please tune into theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s video studio, on Thursday, Jan. 24, when we interview virtualization companies, practitioners and other experts at the Virtualization Technology Group’s annual Winter Warmer event in Foxborough, Massachusetts. Guests will include Keith Townsend, solutions architect at VMware Inc.; Phoummala Schmitt, senior CloudOps advocate at Microsoft; and Rob Ninkovich, former New England Patriots linebacker.

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