What's the future of cloud computing? What are the enterprise cloud computing trends for 2019 to expect, prepare for and leverage to your advantage?
For, whether you:
- are just planning to move your workloads from a data center to a cloud-native architecture
- or you're already “reaping” the benefits of a multi-cloud architecture
… the question remains the same:
“From Kubernetes to serverless computing, to multi-cloud strategies, to containers, to... which will be the top influential cloud trends and patterns in 2019?”
To be honest with you, we, too, as a Drupal firm, have asked ourselves the same question...
Once you've got the answer, you can:
- (properly) prepare for the challenges to come
- turn them into... excellent new opportunities
Now, without any further ado, here are the 5 trends that will dominate the cloud computing industry in 2019:
1. Serverless Computing: More and More Companies “Flock” to Serverless
Serverless technology goes hand in hand with cloud-native architectures...
And the fact that its enterprise adoption will just... explode in 2019 is no news at all, right? Just think of the key features and benefits that serverless “lures” even companies like NetFlix, New York Times or Mapbox with:
- high speed
- reduced costs
- the convenience to port their serverless apps between multiple cloud providers
- the opportunity to run serverless apps both on public clouds and on private data centers
Not only that companies leveraging serverless get to “reap” all the benefits of enterprise cloud computing. But, since they get to run their apps on existing infrastructures, as well, they can modernize their legacy apps, too.
All that in addition to the benefit of streamlining the development cycles of their cloud-native apps.
What makes serverless computing “outshine” standard provisioning servers?
- it's a technology that uses “functions” as a measuring unit (instead of “instances” or VM)
- these pieces of code (“functions”) run automatically
- … and they take over any data format and turn it into a target legacy system “in charge” with processing the response; they can also interpret those messages sent back to consuming apps through the API gateway
- the burden of scaling and managing resources gets passed on to serverless providers (Google Cloud Functions, AWS Lambda, Microsoft Azure, Apache Whisk, OpenFaas)
To sum up: serverless is going to be one of the leading enterprise cloud computing trends for 2019.
- accelerating the development process of cloud-native apps
- “revamping” legacy apps
- cutting down costs
- the convenience of going serverless all while leveraging one's existing infrastructure
… are this technology's top “luring” features.
2. The Enterprise Adoption of Kubernetes Grows at Neck-Breaking Pace
The solid arguments behind this prediction?
- Kubernetes is highly portable
- it's highly available
- it provides unmatched, granular scalability: the go-to choice for scaling containerized applications
- it automates deployment
Whether they're planning to streamline their app development cycles or to rearchitect their existing IT infrastructures, large organizations are “flocking” to this open-source container orchestration system.
The interoperable, composable architecture that it provides, along with its “extreme” availability — it runs on laptops, public//hybrid private cloud, VM — and the increased use of containers turns Kubernets into one of the highly influential enterprise cloud computing trends for 2019.
One powering hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud deployments...
And speaking of containers, Kubernete's simply: convenience at its best (convenience at scale):
You're free to put together clusters of hosts running containers and then just use Kubernetes to easily manage them all. To easily “orchestrate” all your containers.
3. Cloud Data Management: One of the Influential Enterprise Cloud Computing Trends for 2019
With the trend of enterprise cloud computing architecture going up in 2019, it's only but predictable for cloud data management to become one of the hottest topics.
An efficient cloud environment (whether a multi-cloud or a hybrid cloud infrastructure) calls for:
- serious planning
- constant optimization
- data aggregation
- analyzing the stored data
In other words: with data being the key “nucleus” of any enterprise cloud computing architecture, properly managing and improving the quality of all those massive amounts of data becomes critical.
4. The Multi-Cloud Strategy: An Increasingly Compelling Pattern for Companies
Companies will “dread” getting themselves locked-in to a unique cloud service provider.
And so, the multi-cloud strategy is sure to rival the conventional “partnering with a single public cloud” approach.
Why? Hmmm, let's see... getting cloud locked-in means:
- being constrained to integrate that specific public cloud environment's tools, services, APIs
- getting its dependencies “injected” into your application code
- being unable to future-proof your app, to update it to any new technologies that might emerge; you'd automatically “inherit” a technical debt when locked-in to a specific cloud service provider
Whereas having a robust multi-cloud architecture allows large enterprises to:
- “juggle with” multiple dedicated clouds, each one with its specific functionalities and services
- be cloud provider agnostic; and that can only mean more flexibility: companies are free to port their cloud architectures between different environments
- leverage on interoperability; companies will be able to do application>APIs (or on-premise infrastructure ) decoupling
And “flexibility” is the key term here:
- the one that's definitory for modern application development
- the reason why multi-cloud is going to be one of the powerful enterprise cloud computing trends for 2019
The END!
Now, if we are to do a quick recap:
- more and more companies will migrate their workloads to cloud environments; they will be refactoring their legacy apps
- also, we'll be witnessing a massive migration to multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments
- technical skills required for cloud computing will be in even higher demand in 2019
