Serverless on Kubernetes, diverse automation, and more industry trends

Kubernetes workloads in the serverless era: Architecture, platforms, and trends

There are many fascinating elements of the Kubernetes architecture: the containers providing common packaging, runtime and resource isolation model within its foundation; the simple control loop mechanism that monitors the actual state of components and reconciles this with the desired state; the custom resource definitions. But the true enabler for extending Kubernetes to support diverse workloads is the concept of the pod.

A pod provides two sets of guarantees. The deployment guarantee ensures that the containers of a pod are always placed on the same node. This behavior has some useful properties such as allowing containers to communicate synchronously or asynchronously over localhost, over inter-process communication (IPC), or using the local file system.

The impact: If developer adoption of serverless architectures is largely driven by how easily they can be productive working that way, business adoption will be driven by the ability to place this trend in the operational and business context. IT decision-makers need to see a holistic picture of how serverless adds value alongside their existing investments, and operators and architects need to envision how they'll keep it all up and running.

How developers can survive the Last Mile with CodeReady Workspaces

Inside each cloud provider, a host of tools can address CI/CD, testing, monitoring, backing up and recovery problems. Outside of those providers, the cloud native community has been hard at work cranking out new tooling from Prometheus, Knative, Envoy and Fluentd, to Kubenetes itself and the expanding ecosystem of Kubernetes Operators.

Within all of those projects, cloud-based services and desktop utilities is one major gap, however: the last mile of software development is the IDE. And despite the wealth of development projects inside the community and Cloud Native Computing Foundation, it is indeed the Eclipse Foundation, as mentioned above, that has taken on this problem with a focus on the new cloud development landscape.

The impact: Increasingly complex development workflows and deployment patterns call for increasingly intelligent IDEs. While I'm sure it is possible to push a button and redeploy your microservices to a Kubernetes cluster from emacs (or vi, relax), Eclipse Che (and CodeReady Workspaces) are being built from the ground up with these types of cloud-native workflows in mind.

Automate security in increasingly complex hybrid environments

According to the Information Security Forum’s Global Security Threat Outlook for 2019, one of the biggest IT trends to watch this year is the increasing sophistication of cybercrime and ransomware. And even as the volume of ransomware attacks is dropping, cybercriminals are finding new, more potent ways to be disruptive. An article in TechRepublic points to cryptojacking malware, which enables someone to hijack another's hardware without permission to mine cryptocurrency, as a growing threat for enterprise networks.

To more effectively mitigate these risks, organizations could invest in automation as a component of their security plans. That’s because it takes time to investigate and resolve issues, in addition to applying controlled remediations across bare metal, virtualized systems, and cloud environments -- both private and public -- all while documenting changes. 

The impact: This one is really about our ability to trust that the network service providers that we rely upon to keep our phones and smart TVs full of stutter-free streaming HD content have what they need to protect the infrastructure that makes it all possible. I for one am rooting for you!