Computing Trends<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\nA Manifesto for Distributed Computing<\/b><\/h3>\n
It wasn\u2019t long before we ran out of capacity on the biggest computers made at the time. We needed scale, which meant a fleet of front-end web servers, which meant we needed to build a distributed system.<\/p>\n
At Amazon, engineers wrote a \u201cDistributed Computing Manifesto.\u201d The objective was to separate the presentation layer, business logic and data, while ensuring that reliability, scale, performance and security met an incredibly high bar and kept costs under control. This removed bottlenecks to software development by scaling our monolith into what we would now call a service-oriented architecture.<\/p>\n
Computing at Massive Scale \u2013 Why So Hard?!<\/b><\/h3>\n
Programming patterns and abstractions in both hardware and software have solved lots of problems.<\/p>\n
One we\u2019ve not solved is distributed systems. Distributed Systems are about designing for failure. And systems fail all the time. There are whole fields of computer science dedicated to consistency, availability and partitions.<\/p>\n
And service-oriented architectures can actually make things extraordinarily more<\/i> complex with dozens of services talking to each other \u2013 and absent observability tools and dashboards \u2013 it\u2019s hard to know if we were experiencing a problem in networking, databases, or something else.<\/p>\nTowards Distributed Systems<\/b><\/h3>\n
With virtualization, cloud, and containers, we\u2019re running applications inside multiple isolated user-space instances, containers, to which only parts of the kernel resources are allocated.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve now reached the point of making it easy to break complex monolithic applications into smaller, modular microservices \u2013 fully encapsulated into one neat container.<\/p>\n
We Can Go Further<\/b><\/h3>\n
We\u2019re ready for the broad-based use of distributed systems for commercial interests. We have these elastic, micro-services-based, containerized applications running at scale, and we need something to orchestrate them.<\/p>\n
Enter Kubernetes to deploy applications into the right containers, autoscale, execute efficient bin packing, decommission containers that aren\u2019t in use, and monitor health. And Kubernetes will continue to improve given it\u2019s large community and ecosystem.<\/p>\n
And we\u2019re now operating on multiple clouds, on-prem, in hybrid environments \u2013 we\u2019re able to address more specific needs like operating at the edge.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s Next<\/b><\/h3>\n
These are the next biggest challenges to address and opportunities I see for entrepreneurially-minded companies.<\/p>\n
Etcd<\/b><\/h4>\n
<\/b>\u2013 A lot of folks love to talk about how complex and frustrating etcd is. It’s more just the fact that etcd is a distributed system, and distributed systems are inherently complex and frustrating. The opportunity is to make this self-healing and largely invisible for customers.<\/p>\nService Discovery & Networking<\/b><\/h4>\n
With thousands of micro-services managing service discovery and appropriately designing and segmenting our network, we still require specialized knowledge. There\u2019s a variety of service meshes \u2013 which aim to solve the traffic management, security, and observability challenges introduced by microservices and distributed architecture. And of course there\u2019s still the interaction of the physical network. Likely there\u2019s more than one solution to this problem \u2013 because it crosses so many domains \u2013 but interoperability will be key, not sloughing off the complexity onto platform operators like we see now.<\/p>\n
Databases<\/b><\/h4>\n
Most folks are still running databases the old way. Using a Database as a managed service from one of the cloud providers or vendors makes some of these problems go away, but we need automated deployment, fine-grained resource allocation and efficient use of resources and portability.<\/p>\n
Storage<\/b><\/h4>\n
container attached storage is in its infancy. We need to to take all the innovations we\u2019ve seen in cloud storage \u2013 especially around object and block storage and bring them fully into the container world.<\/p>\n
Security<\/b><\/h4>\n
This is harder than ever. It\u2019s not feasible just to have perimeter security or lock down every port. Traditional security tools were not designed to monitor running containers. Namespaces are not a security boundary. I see the next frontier of container-aware security focused less on the specific infrastructure and more about the end-to-end application operating on many underlying resources.<\/p>\n
A fundamental theme of the past 35 years has been the ever-increasing scale of a simple objective: to connect systems together, and then to abstract away the infrastructure and other complexities from our developers and end-users.<\/p>\n
Looking forward, I\u2019m excited to see the industry take the innovations from containers \u2013 strong isolation, fast startup and efficient use of resources \u2013 and fully build out the world of micro-VMs.<\/p>\n
![\"Computing](\"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/cloud-platforms\/files\/2023\/03\/MicrosoftTeams-image-1.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Expert](\"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/cloud-platforms\/files\/2023\/01\/oie_6194352a4wFeWoG.png\")
The internet is getting old. Next year marks 35 years from dialing up to web-based computing.\u00a0 We\u2019re making incredible progress in connecting systems together \u2013 but we\u2019re making things more complex too. Fortunately we\u2019re building better technology \u2013 and I\u2019ve never been more excited about what\u2019s coming.<\/p>\n![\"Download](\"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/cloud-platforms\/files\/2018\/07\/Managed-Service-Providers-Speedbump-1.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div><\/div>\n![\"Download](\"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/cloud-platforms\/files\/2019\/04\/Cloud-MSP-Speedbump-VendorMap.jpg\")
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