Last Year’s Predictions and 4 Kubernetes and Edge Trends to Watch | – Spiceworks News and Insights

The edge computing landscape is evolving fast. How can enterprises best prepare to ride the upcoming trends? In this article, Stewart McGrath, CEO and co-founder of Section, reviews the predictions from last year about Kubernetes and the edge and examines four key trends to look forward to.

As this year draws to a close, I thought it would be a good time to throw out a few predictions about what 2023 holds for the Kubernetes, container orchestration and edge computing landscape. But first, Id like to hold ourselves accountable and look back on the predictions we made this time last year. In retrospect, how did we score?

1. The use of containers at the edge will continue to growThe Internet of Things, online gaming, video conferencing and a whole host of emerging use cases mean the use of containers at the edge will continue to grow. Moreover, as usage increases, so too will organizational expectations. Companies will demand more from edge platform providers in terms of support to help ease deployment and ongoing operations.

This one is tough to measure as theres little data available. This outcome seems inevitable, and anecdotal evidence from conversations with analysts, customers and others in the industry indicates it is, in fact, happening. That said, without hard evidence, I have to give us a N/A on the score check here.

2. Kubernetes will become central to edge computingHosting and edge platforms built to support Kubernetes will have a competitive advantage in flexibly supporting modern DevOps teams requirements. Edge platform providers who can ease integration with Kubernetes-aware environments will attract attention from the growing cloud-native community; for example, leveraging Helm charts to allow application builders to hand over their application manifest and rely on an intelligent edge orchestration system to deploy clusters accordingly.How about 7.5 out of 10 on this one? The overall ecosystem developing around Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) technologies is growing quickly and extensively. CNCF projects like KubeVirt, Knative, WASM, Krustlet, Dapr and others indicate the growing acceptance of Kubernetes as an operating system of choice for not only containers but also virtual machines and serverless workloads. Providers of limited distribution for Kubernetes clusters, such as VMWares Tanzu, Rafay Systems and Platform9, continue to build and help customers run on multi-location, always-on footprints, while our location-aware global Kubernetes platform as a service grew substantially in its ability to help customers instantly run Kubernetes workloads in the right place at the right time.

3. CDN attempts to reinvent themselves will gain paceIn the year ahead, content delivery networks (CDNs) will increasingly recognize the need to diversify away from the steadily declining margins of large object (e.g., video and download) delivery. In addition to reinventing themselves as application security platforms, CDNs will continue to lean into the application hosting market. Cloudflare and Fastly have built on their existing infrastructure to deliver distributed serverless. We expect other CDNs will enter and/or expand offerings focused on the application hosting market as they seek to capitalize on their investment in building distributed networks. I am going to take a 10 out of 10 here. Akamai indicated a major shift when it spent nearly $1 billion acquiring Linode to plunge headlong into the application hosting space and recently announced its investment in data network company Macrometa. Fastly and Cloudflare have continued to expand their Edge offerings and, at recent conferences, reinforced the importance of their Edge compute plays for the future of their companies.

4. Telcos will riseTelcos will start developing more mature approaches to application hosting and leverage their unique differentiation of massively distributed networks to deliver hosting options at the edge. Additionally, more partnerships will emerge to facilitate the connection between developers and telcos 5G and edge infrastructure to solve their lack of expertise in this space. We were too optimistic, so Ill give this one a 5 out of 10. The telcos do seem to be moving in this direction but are moving at a typical telco pace. While players like Lumen have continued to roll out hosting infrastructure in distributed footprints, we did not see a monumental shift released by any telco during 2022.

See More: Whats Next for DevOps? Four DevOps Predictions for 2023

Overall, Id give ourselves 22.5 out of 30, or 75% (having removed the N/A score). Definitely a passing mark, but some headroom for excellence this year!

See More: Predictions for Service Mesh and Microservices: What Does 2023 Have in Store?

Kubernetes environments allow for the dynamic scheduling of non-related workloads in a single cluster. With the development of greater levels of Kubernetes abstraction and the hardening of security and observability, I can see a world where providers of Kubernetes clusters will announce the availability of their clusters to a general global pool of available resources on which a developer could deploy workloads.

Each cluster will be able to describe its attributes (location, capacity, compliance, etc.), and devs will be able to let an overall orchestration system match workload requirements to underlying attributes of contributed clusters (e.g., needs GPU, PCI DSS, specific always on locations, etc.). This will be the next evolution of cloud computing: a dynamic cloud of clusters.

The Kubernetes ecosystem has continued to demonstrate remarkable growth over the past 12 months. I have no doubt well see further evolution in the coming year as the demand for better automation of deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications is clear.

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Last Year's Predictions and 4 Kubernetes and Edge Trends to Watch | - Spiceworks News and Insights