Hedvig Predictions for 2019

This article was written by Gaurav Yadav, founding engineer and product manager, Hedvig, Inc. His previous experience includes working with a search-engine start-up, Google and Oracle.

It’s 2019 and we’re in the last ‘teens’ of the century in the journey towards digital transformation. It only makes sense that digital businesses would continue maturing over the next year in geography, size, and complexity. As more on-premise infrastructure moves to private and public cloud, optimizing the management of hybrid cloud and containerized deployments becomes ever more important. Getting the most from hybrid environments will be determined by refined and matured orchestration capabilities that protect data, business operations, and give customers even better degrees of control, visibility, and automation.

No more excuses – 2019 is the time to streamline and standardize migrations, workflows, and orchestration. As organizations ramp up deployments in public cloud infrastructure, they need better ways to make migrations efficient and reliable while running existing distributed applications on public cloud without changing the application or associated workflow.

In all this, don’t forget about your users. When moved to public cloud users shouldn’t have to relearn anything, or even care about the underlying infrastructure. Cloud storage should look and feel like local storage so employees can’t tell the difference. Compute, networking, and storage need to work seamlessly together in hybrid deployments. We recommend following – and contributing to – software defined storage standards development.

The same will be true for multi-cloud deployments once they emerge into mainstream use. There are not yet strong use cases for the practice of running distributed applications across multiple public cloud infrastructure providers with no on-premise component. Many are being explored, including the need to meet specific geography-delineated regulatory requirements. In 2019, multi-cloud will remain a hot topic of conversation, and we think it’s wise to follow those who are working to identify meaningful, effective ways of deploying and orchestrating it. Once the industry optimizes hybrid cloud environments, multi-cloud will be a logical next step.

Another key milestone is that containers are finally becoming production ready. As the next big thing in virtualization and resource utilization, they are now being used for mission-critical applications. We’ll see a major increase in production deployment containers in 2019, which raises the profile of associated challenges like storage. Containers require persistent storage in order to succeed in mainstream use cases.

Many storage solutions currently cater to virtualization vendor platforms like VMware, but aren’t a great fit for container technology. In 2019, the problem to solve for is finding one storage solution to support these completely independent virtualization mechanisms so that they can co-exist efficiently. From the application point of view, they are different mechanisms, but that shouldn’t matter when it comes to storage. Making progress on this aspect of container deployment will bring much-needed simplification to this infrastructure option.

Maintaining the accelerating trajectory toward digital transformation, innovation, and growth while also building trust, protecting data and systems, and optimizing for cost and efficiency is a tall order. Ensuring that distributed applications and business processes run as smoothly as possible is job number one. We believe SDS is a critical factor in meeting the unique set of cloud deployment challenges each IT team is sure to face in the year ahead.