The storage and processing options available in a hybrid computing world have created new accessibility in cloud computing, but businesses still need supportive technologies to streamline the bridge between multiple disparate data environments.

To ensure organizations can actually take advantage of the multicloud opportunity, Jason McGee (pictured), IBM fellow, vice president and chief technology officer of IBM Cloud Platform, is working to develop that bridge through open-source container-based technology.

McGee spoke with Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Think event in San Francisco. They discussed current cloud challenges and how IBM has equipped itself to solve them. The answers were condensed for clarity. (* Disclosure below.)

Vellante: What’s the underlying trend in the coding world?

McGee: The fundamental problem we’re solving is how do you build a platform that lets app developers focus on building their apps and not focus on all the plumbing and the infrastructure for running those apps. We did that 20 years ago in Java with app servers, and we’re doing it now with cloud. And we’re doing it on top of containers.

Miniman: Talk to us about where IBM fits into this discussion of service meshes.

McGee: We’ve been on this journey as an industry over the last year to build a new app platform, and service meshes fit the part of the problem which is how does everything talk to each other and how do I actually control that and get visibility into it.

IBM has had a founding role in that project. My team at IBM and Google got together with the guys at Lyft to create Istio. What I’m most excited about in 2019 is that technology is transitioning into something people are using in production, in their applications. It’s becoming more of the default stack that people are using, helping them do security, visibility and control over their applications.

Miniman: Kubernetes, serverless, Knative, how do they fit together? What’s IBM doing there?

McGee: They’re all part of this continuum of how developers build apps. If you look at serverless applications, there’s the serverless dimension, I think they’re more about event-oriented computing and how do you have a good model for event-oriented systems today with Kubernetes and Istio, I think we’ve built the base platform; I think with Knative what we’re doing is bringing serverless, and also 12-factor applications, into the fold in a more formal way. When we get all those pieces together and integrate them, then developers [can] unleash to build their application in whatever way it makes the most sense for what they’re doing.

Most apps [realistically] aren’t going to all be serverless or all be Kubernetes; there’s going to be some mix. Part of what I look at is how to bring all these things together in a way that is easy for the developer to stay focused. One of the things we’re announcing this week is managed Istio support as part of our Kubernetes service. That developer can use the capability of Istio without worrying about install and run and just get value out of its capabilities.

Knative, obviously, is a project much earlier in its maturation than something like Istio, but we’re making that available as part of our public and private clouds as well, so people can get started with the ideas of Knative, have an easy way to get that environment stood up, and start building those applications.

Miniman: Give some guideposts that we should be looking at as 2019 rolls through.

McGee: This unified application platform notion that we’ve been touching on here will really come into its own in 2019. One of the things I’m excited about with Knative is by bringing serverless and 12-factor into Kubernetes, it allows each of those frameworks to be the best and not solve unrelated problems. Serverless versus Kube, both think all problems will be solved in their camp, which means they try to solve all problems. This unification will allow really high efficiency 12-factor and serverless in the context of Kube and will change how people are able to use these platforms.

Miniman: What might accelerate some of this adoption?

McGee: One of the things holding people back is the diversity of options that exists in the cloud-native space. That’s really frightening for the average enterprise. Which of these things are going to be useful? Which are going to exist in a year? How do I make bets on these things? The agreement around Kubernetes that happened in the last 18 months or so was really liberating for a lot of people. If we can all agree on a few more pieces around Istio, around Knative, it will really help unlock people and get them trying.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s weeklong coverage of the IBM Think event. (* Disclosure: IBM sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither IBM nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE