The first thing to mention is that OpenStack incorporated and supports the DevOps model. This is a cloud technology breakthrough that supports digital transformation projects through cost savings, improved efficiency, agile application development, and simplified deployment. It uses modern microservices and serverless architectures, which reduce infrastructure configuration complexities. Those are largely enabled through cloud management technologies that stick to key open source software applications. With OpenStack players adopting DevOps models, this will further promote security by design, autonomy, and automation in all infrastructures.
Secondly, we have the application lifecycle management (ALM). Infrastructure providers are moving up the cloud stack, beyond private or hybrid models, and into technologies that use ALM capabilities to help support a DevOps model. Such models orchestrate the whole application and platform ecosystem of technology across the entire lifecycle. Technologies such as security and application performance monitoring (APM) play an important role in filling out ALM solutions, also known as application and platforms lifecycle management (APLM). OpenStack tooling has a number of features designed to interact with the application catalog, for instance managing what’s in the catalog, and determining how apps in the catalog are deployed.
Also important are microservices. After significant delays in the adoption of a microservices architecture due to configuration complexities, innovations in the form of new tools and frameworks have triggered an interest among infrastructure and cloud providers to integrate service mesh technologies into their management solutions. This will be followed by increased demand for a serverless computing architecture for supporting platforms and pricing that scale up with application demand and scale down to zero when not in use, leaving server management to the cloud provider. On OpenStack you can deploy Microservices Architecture using Kubernetes, Docker, Flannel etc.
Kubernetes has played a large role in the trend towards orchestration and management of modernised application deployment through containerisation. The movement to ease operational management and automation has increased over 2020, as traditional data centre vendors have begun partnering with cloud providers to help abstract complex configuration requirements. The aim of this is to help enterprises move modern apps into production and keep pace with large-scale digital transformations more easily through automatic software updates and ALM across various cloud environments. Some enterprises are working solely with containers, but other use containers, virtual machines and bare metal. OpenStack is able to bring all technologies together and manage it from one platform.
Moving on to edge computing. Enterprises are deploying data centre resources such as compute, storage, and data management and analytics software at the edge of their operational footprints, to support applications that require high levels of performance and low latency, and to manage and process data associated with IoT initiatives. Edge computing will complement traditional data centres and the use of cloud-based IT. In many cases, enterprises will rely on cloud consumption models to access edge IT resources. OpenStack provides fundamental infrastructure building blocks that can be deployed anywhere, including the edge of the network. The flexible and modular nature of OpenStack means you can efficiently run the minimal services required at the edge, yet provide robust support for bare metal, container technologies and virtual machines. OpenStack is already the most highly distributed infrastructure software, running in thousands of datacenters around the world, and many users in the telecom and retail industries are working now to advance the edge computing use case with OpenStack.
Lastly, there is multi-cloud management. Several issues are behind the rapid advance of multi-cloud environments, in which an organisation uses the on-demand infrastructures of multiple providers to support a common application or applications. Enterprises were drawn to this model as a way to ensure redundancy and also avoid cloud lock-in. Regulations might also require organisations to store data in certain geographies or nations, requiring the use of multiple cloud providers. The challenge is managing these heterogeneous environments as if they are a single architecture. Some vendors and service providers offer solutions to streamline the management of workloads across multiple cloud service provider platforms.
So, there they are. The latest, most important developments and technologies around OpenStack. What do you think about these trends and technologies? Which ones do you use mostly? Let me know in the comments.
Source: GlobalData Thematic Research (2021). Cloud computing: Technology trends.
