Trends Inc

In the beginning of this year I wrote a blog post where I conclude that Kubernetes is evolving as the defacto standard for container orchestration. Fast forward to now and this has become the reality. Every cloud platform vendor now offering a Kubernetes based service; some even did a U-turn on their product strategies to adopt the Kubernetes way.

I am not a big fan of predictions in tech business. I have seen a number of prediction articles on the web lately featuring all the hot keywords. They do to attract eyeballs I must admit. In this blog though, I list out a few other industry trends of the moment, which are also likely to pan out in 2018. Let me add the disclaimer, these aren’t predictions.

Cloud’s Big 3

Firstly, it would be interesting to find what new the big 3 cloud vendors bring out their stables in 2018. I am particularly interested to see whether Google catches up or falls further back with the other two.

Containerisation

As much as we want to think futuristic, a large percentage of the world is still just starting out on microservices and containers, and therefore we should expect to see continued new entrants and investment in this space.

Service mesh

Service mesh technology is climbing up the hype cycle and still evolving. Companies which are running 100s or 1000s of microservices on production are already looking into service mesh tech like istio, envoy, etc instead of more traditional API management tooling.

Container-native storage

Staying on containerization, CNS (Container Native Storage) standards should mature driving enterprises to invest in container-native storage technology.

Serverless

Serverless (or FaaS) seems to gather good initial adopter tailwinds and is likely to get a lot of attention in 2018. Curious how serverless technology evolves and whether it would augment or challenge PaaS platforms.

A few more

A great deal of innovation is coming from opensource and should be more and more so. There is a lot of activity now around AI and this is bound to influence some of the areas mentioned above. Other trends like VR and IoT seemed to be flattening over the last year, whereas "edge-computing" seems to gain ground. Blockchain has been generating a lot of corporate noise riding on cryptocurrency bullruns but are yet to prove if they are not just hot air.