{"id":58075,"date":"2022-09-07T15:29:27","date_gmt":"2022-09-07T15:29:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.techrepublic.com\/?p=3993903"},"modified":"2022-09-07T15:29:27","modified_gmt":"2022-09-07T15:29:27","slug":"this-new-connectivity-layer-will-define-the-next-decade-of-cloud-infrastructure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/?p=58075","title":{"rendered":"This new connectivity layer will define the next decade of cloud infrastructure"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Isometric
Image: Golden Sikorka\/Adobe Stock<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the early 2000s, a major shift was underway as a new world of \u201cscale out\u201d distributed computing threatened the \u201cscale-up\u201d status quo. Enterprise infrastructure was moving away from the gigantic and expensive Sun Sparc servers that had ruled for so long to a new form factor. The movement didn\u2019t have a name yet, but it had some critical technology building blocks \u2014 the Linux operating system, x86 architecture, cheaper hardware, hypervisors and more.<\/p>\n

If you are old enough to have attended events like COMDEX, then the IT industry\u2019s biggest trade show, you remember the early debates on what to call this nascent world of distributed computing. All sorts of impressive-sounding phrases emerged \u2014 Grid Computing Utility Computing, Liquid Computing, On-Demand and more \u2014 but none ultimately stuck. Still, if nothing else, it was a creative time for technology marketers at systems vendors.<\/p>\n

Among this mishmash of hopeful terms, the movement got a name that stuck: Cloud. AWS and VMware became its first vendor posterchildren. And the rules of not only datacenter infrastructure but developer workflow would be completely rewritten as clusters of Linux boxes began running the world\u2019s most popular services.<\/p>\n

Another murky juncture emerges<\/h2>\n

It feels like we\u2019re in a similar spot today, where there\u2019s been a lot of churn around new cloud-native infrastructure pieces, but it\u2019s tough to figure out where it\u2019s all heading. It\u2019s also missing a name, but clearly something big is brewing.<\/p>\n

SEE: Hiring Kit: Cloud Engineer<\/a> (TechRepublic Premium)<\/strong><\/p>\n

We\u2019re nearly 10 years since the release of Docker, eight years since the release of Kubernetes, and there are enough cloud-native graduated and incubating projects to make your head spin. But along the way in this shift in application design to API-driven microservices and the rise of Kubernetes-based platform engineering, networking and security have struggled to keep up.<\/p>\n

In Kubernetes adoption speak, we\u2019ve shifted from \u201cDay 1\u201d adoption challenges, to \u201cDay 2\u201d challenges of how to make K8s infrastructure easier for platform teams to operate and scale.<\/p>\n

Kubernetes breaks traditional networking and security. And platform teams have been in a near decade-long scramble to piece together bespoke solutions to the explosion of east-west communication, new requirements for workload and API-layer visibility for zero-trust security and observability, and not the least needing to integrate legacy networks and workloads running outside of Kubernetes. It\u2019s basically about services communicating with each other over distributed networks atop a Linux kernel that was never designed for cloud-native in the first place.<\/p>\n

This is really hard stuff for platform teams and very expensive for enterprises footing the bill for engineers to figure it all out.<\/p>\n