Oracle: Cloud-Native Apps to Drive DevOps Change

Source- containerjournal.com

Oracle is betting this coming year will see accelerated adoption of a raft of nascent emerging container and cloud-native technologies that will radically transform a range of DevOps processes.

Siddhartha Agarwal, vice president of product management and cloud strategy for Oracle Cloud Platform, predicts 2019 will witness more organizations hiring platform engineers in place of traditional IT administrators as the shift to cloud-native technologies such as Docker containers and Kubernetes continues to gain momentum.

Agarwal also expects to see significant adoption of technologies such as Kata containers that provide an alternative to tradition virtual machines for deploying containers, and that open source computing frameworks such based on containers such as Fn Project will become more widely invoked. A major driver of the adoption is increased awareness and concern over becoming locked into a proprietary cloud service, says Agarwal.

In fact, many more legacy applications this year will be containerized as part of efforts to abandon on-premises IT environment whenever possible, adds Agarwal. That shift to cloud will be further accelerated by increased reliance on managed services to automate that management of IT infrastructure, including the databases and middleware required to run both new and existing applications.

Finally, Agarwal says other emerging technologies that will be more widely relied on include blockchain platform to create immutable records of transactions and various classes of data science technologies. He predicts that not only will 8 out of 10 custom applications include some of embedded intelligence, the number of applications employing bots rather than a graphical interface to interact with end users will sharply rise as well.

Overall, Agarwal says the transition to cloud-native applications is driving a rise in IT infrastructure complexity that will drive increased reliance on IT automation as well as managed services provided either by the cloud service provider or one its affiliated services partners. Even then, however, organizations will need to find ways to hire and retain platform engineers that have the skills required to manage IT operations at scale. Most enterprise IT organizations will not be able to get by relying on traditional system administrators to manage the environments cloud-native applications are being deployed on. Those environments will consist of a range of rapidly changing applications running at unprecedented levels of scale on a broad mix of virtual and physical machines running on multiple cloud and on-premises IT environments, he says.

In effect, Agarwal says the shift to cloud-native technologies will finally force adoption of best DevOps practices across most of the IT environment, versus the pockets of the IT organization that might be employing DevOps processes to manage a handful of applications.

Of course, the rate at which that transition occurs will be tied to the rate at which developers inside IT organizations embrace containers to build next-generation applications. But as developers continue to force the DevOps issue by employing containers, the more pressure there will be to modernize the IT processes relied on to manage the overall IT environment. The only real question now is to what degree any IT organization will decide to be proactive about making a transition that is now all but inevitable.