APMdigest invited industry experts to predict how Cloud will evolve and impact application performance and business in 2019. Part 2 covers multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, serverless and more.

Start with 2019 Cloud Predictions - Part 1

Start with 2019 Application Performance Management Predictions

Start with 2019 Network Performance Management Predictions

PAAS ESSENTIAL FOR HYBRID AND MULTI-CLOUD

PaaS platforms will become the primary platforms for building hybrid, multi-cloud enterprise clouds. Portability of applications and workloads across internal and external clouds will be essential for digital transformation at enterprise scale.
John Van Siclen
CEO, Dynatrace

AUTOMATION REQUIRED FOR HYBRID CLOUD

IT executives will accelerate their automation efforts, including the adoption of AI, to simplify their increasingly complex hybrid, web-scale cloud environments.
John Van Siclen
CEO, Dynatrace

Cloud-first is the new norm. In 2019, large enterprises will fully embrace this stance and will expend considerable resources on creating and maintaining hybrid cloud environments. Alongside this, as businesses modernize their data infrastructure, we'll also see a move to being automation-first — making automation of data ingestion and processing a standard part of any cloud migration effort. New environments bring fresh challenges, and companies making this transition will not only be evolving how they work to best leverage the cloud, they will also be navigating working within an infrastructure where they data resides both on-premises and on different cloud environments. Companies will need to become more agile in how they execute a multi-cloud strategy, so we will see increasingly rapidly adoption and development of new cloud environments, powered by automation.
Neil Barton
CTO, WhereScape

SMALLER COMPANIES CHOOSE SINGLE CLOUD

Multi-cloud will be the default IT architecture for most larger organization while others will choose the simplicity and consistency of a single cloud provider. Containers have the potential to disrupt the cloud business model and break vendor lock-in by making development environments highly portable. This will make it easier and easier to move the work to where data is being generated rather than what has traditionally been the other way around. Data is far less portable than compute and application resources and that affects the portability of runtime environments. Even if you solve for data gravity, data consistency, data protection, data security and so on, you can still face the problem of platform lock-in and cloud-specific services that you're writing against, which are not portable. As a result, smaller organizations will either develop in-house capabilities as an alternative to cloud service providers, or they'll choose the simplicity, optimization and hands-off management that come from buying into a single cloud provider. And you can count on service providers to develop new differentiators and encourage lock-in.
Atish Gude
Chief Strategy Officer, NetApp

ENTERPRISES REPATRIATE DATA FROM PUBLIC CLOUD

There's No Place Like Home - Cloud Repatriation Increases: While the growth of the public cloud will remain strong, enterprises will expand their adoption of on-premises private clouds in a hybrid cloud model. This will include repatriating data from the public cloud to avoid the bandwidth, latency and cost issues that can arise when accessing such data.
Jon Toor
CMO, Cloudian

CLOUD DRIVES VDI

Enterprises will continue to choose a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) as the best solution for serving a remote and distributed workforce that is accessing applications from hybrid or native public clouds, and on a multitude of devices. The desktop of 2019 and beyond is now a digital workspace in which workers expect to access custom applications wherever or however they are working. VDI solutions will be the choice of enterprises that need to deliver these applications efficiently to users, and to be able to update and/or patch applications without slowing down user productivity.
Matthias Haas
CTO, IGEL

Desktop virtualization is at an inflection point heading into 2019, with Microsoft poised to release its Windows Virtual Desktop offering, and ongoing vendor consolidation in the big platform players as they try to maintain competitive parity with each other. While most virtual desktop compute power remains on-premises, the fastest trend is moving control planes into the cloud, both as a first step towards moving more infrastructure but also because it enables hybrid models. The end game here is that it becomes irrelevant whether the virtual desktops and sessions are hosted, which will lead to healthy cost competition and freedom to select the most efficient desktop virtualization technology.
Jon Rolls
VP, User Workspace Management Products, Ivanti

CLOUD NATIVE NETWORK OPERATING SYSTEM

New solutions liberate cloud native environments constricted by network performance: Though cloud applications are more demanding, portable, and dynamic than ever, the network simply can’t keep up. To support cloud services, we need to shed light on the operator first, resulting in a Cloud Native Network Operating System (CN-NOS). A NOS approach that aligns with containerized microservices, Cloud Native, and DevOps in terms of agility, scalability, customization, and security is what’s in store for 2019. Applying Cloud Native principles to the NOS will bring the management of development, operations, and network into alignment, curing a host of ills.
Glenn Sullivan
Co-Founder, SnapRoute

GREATER FOCUS ON SERVERLESS

Serverless, which is still vastly misunderstood, is now firmly entrenched as the belle of the cloud ball. If it can be serverless, it is or soon will be. Cloud providers have been and will continue to enhance their offerings by moving to support the growing use of serverless — a.k.a. Function as a Service — both as an external and internal facing application component. By the end of 2019 we should expect to see greater attention paid to enterprise concerns with respect to the fledgling technology.
Lori MacVittie
Principal Technical Evangelist, Office of the CTO, F5 Networks

NEXT GEN CLOUD

Next-generation cloud will be the next step. As many businesses have traveled the pathway to the cloud, the next evolution is the effective nature of cloud attributes. Today, many businesses have a focus on automation within the cloud. While automating the infrastructure and components are critical, the next logical step is automating business processes, as they correlate to the effective use of the infrastructure. Many automation tools exist, however lack of common application program interfaces (APIs) prevent uniform context relevant within the infrastructure. 2019 may see the evolution of a common framework and API, which can be leveraged within a multi-cloud environment. Automating to solve a business challenge and metric to give the clear competitive advantage is what will change the relevance of cloud for many companies.
Sean McGrath
VP, DXS Architect, InterVision

Read 2019 Cloud Predictions - Part 3, the final installment.