Red Hat’s predictions for developers and the cloud in 2014
Monday, 6 January 2014 00:00
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Red Hat recently rounded out technology-focused predictions with thoughts for developers, and what the market can expect to see around cloud apps in the coming year.
1. Big data ISVs will increasingly innovate at the analytics layer, driving core technology standardisation and certifications.
Big data is forcing ISVs to add value through innovation at the analytics layer. But ISVs are scrambling to build applications that support many nonstandard variants of core big data infrastructure technology. This includes the operating system, storage infrastructure, and core big data infrastructure such as Hadoop and new styles of databases – the modern equivalent of the LAMP stack. The establishment of industry-wide standards and formal certifications across the stack will create fewer variants ISVs need to support with mechanisms for service and support. This will enable faster market adoption for ISVs products – Red Hat Vice President and General Manager Storage, Ranga Rangachari
2. The lines between Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) get blurrier.
The line between PaaS and IaaS will continue to blur as customers will increasingly focus on their applications and how PaaS/IaaS can help accelerate application development and deployment. We’ll also see increasing innovation in the types of applications that are being created to take advantage of the underlying cloud platform elasticity and scalability – Red Hat Vice President and General Manager Cloud and OpenShift Ashesh Badani
3. In 2014, interoperability between PaaS and OpenStack will continue to be reinforced. Will OpenStack replace PaaS?
In reality, the two are complementary; PaaS generates workloads, while OpenStack offers a place to store them. We’re going to continue to work toward tighter integration and better operability between PaaS and OpenStack – Red Hat Director Product Marketing, Virtualisation and OpenStack Chuck Dubuque
Boundaries between IaaS, PaaS and SaaS are going to break down and there will be better integration between the three; the Solum OpenStack project is a perfect example of this – Red Hat Cloud Evangelist Gordon Haff
4. Data virtualisation gains momentum.
Figuratively speaking, data can be worth its weight in gold in today’s information age, but only if an organisation is able to effectively capture and use it. Unfortunately, data in many organisations is distributed across multiple operational and analytical systems, making it difficult to efficiently and accurately harness its value with traditional consolidation or replication methods. Lean integration techniques such as data virtualisation are emerging as an answer to these challenges and are likely to gain popularity in the coming year based on their ability to connect, abstract and unify heterogeneous data sources – Red Hat Senior Principal Product Marketing Manager - Middleware Syed Rasheed
5. DevOps in-demand.
Questions around how to better leverage cloud for application developers are popping up everywhere and will continue to in 2014. Next year, there will be more conversations around DevOps with a focus on PaaS and container technology. Containers will become increasingly popular amongst IT teams and developers are going to demand the advantages offered by DevOps both in terms of hardship processes and tools – Red Hat Director OpenShift Strategy Krishnan Subramanian
6. PaaS in the enterprise: growing demand for more complex, fully-supported, enterprise application services. Enter xPaaS.
PaaS will continue to gain traction in the enterprise and drive demand for more complex, fully supported, enterprise application services within PaaS offerings (known as xPaaS). As these efficiencies in cloud platforms and corresponding infrastructure continue to progress, the role of proprietary virtualisation will be diminished due to high cost and concerns surrounding manageability, portability and lock-in – Red Hat Vice President and General Manager Cloud and OpenShift Ashesh Badani
7. From ‘purpose-built’ apps to mobile apps in federal agencies.
Federal agencies have typically developed ‘purpose built’ applications for desktops but looking forward, developers will be focused on moving many of those applications to mobile devices for both citizen facing and internal facing applications. 2014 will see an explosion of public sector developers using a cloud infrastructure and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to create mobile applications. It has never been more important for agencies to accommodate for factors such as teleworking and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), and the only way to do that is to move the front-end applications to mobile platforms – Red Hat Chief Technology Strategist US Public Sector Gunnar Hellekson
8. Moving innovations from the decomposition phase to the integration phase.
At a macro level, the IT industry tends to cycle through multi-year phases of decomposition and integration. The decomposition phase is marked by an explosion of invention and creative innovation, with new tools and platforms that solve interesting problems. Look at the innovations that have happened in the mobile, social, cloud and big data arenas recently. It’s wonderful, but now the challenge is to make these things valuable to the business. This is the mark of the integration phase. Innovations are integrated with existing assets to increase productivity and profitability. I believe we’re starting to move from a phase of innovating point solutions to innovating the way they are integrated into the business – Red Hat Director Product Marketing, Middleware Pierre Fricke
9. Hybrid software-defined storage will increasingly become an important means to maintain application and data portability across hybrid IT environments.
The increasing hybridisation of IT coupled with big data and software-defined infrastructure trends has caused a major shift in storage infrastructure – from expensive and inflexible hardware-centric storage to software-defined storage. As a result, hybrid software-defined storage will increasingly become an important means to maintain application and data portability across hybrid IT environments. Elastic, POSIX-based storage software that incorporates common APIs across your hybrid environment is the only way to move data easily between public, private and hybrid on-premise environments. This is absolutely essential for maximum flexibility and portability of applications and data among different providers and between on-premise infrastructure and off-premise providers – Red Hat Vice President and General Manager Storage Ranga Rangachari
10. Efficiencies + security = increased private cloud adoption.
Enterprises want the efficiencies that are offered by cloud but they are not ready to trust public clouds with their mission critical data. Being siloed isn’t an option because lacking the efficiency of the cloud would lead to a competitive disadvantage. Therefore, in 2014 organisations will increasingly embrace a private cloud environment to have the security they need with the efficiency they want – Red Hat Director OpenShift Strategy Krishnan Subramanian
11. Public clouds: Increased adoption; open source remains dominant.
We will continue to see an increase in the number of enterprises willing to use public clouds for some of their workloads, although there will still be lingering concerns around security and compliance, where the data should live, and regulations. We’ll also see the continued dominance of open source in the building of clouds, especially public clouds – Red Hat Cloud Evangelist Gordon Haff
12. We believe that organisations, large and small, will continue to move more workloads to the public cloud and leverage public PaaS services. Despite increased public cloud adoption, the enterprise cloud deployment, in 2014 and beyond, remains inherently hybrid – Red Hat Vice President and General Manager Cloud and OpenShift Ashesh Badani13. Services and tools for cloud visibility and controlled access on the rise.
In 2014, visibility into cloud is going to be the key to security. Users are going to want more visibility into how cloud works – whether it is infrastructure or PaaS. Right now the cloud is still in a “black box” sort of state where users don’t know or understand what’s happening. 2014 will focus on services or tools that enable visibility as well as setting up controlled access – Red Hat Director OpenShift Strategy Krishnan Subramanian
