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Public Cloud
Public Cloud- As with any enterprise technology, there are benefits and challenges when creating IT environments in the public cloud. The benefits include cost savings and the ability to easily scale up and down (just to name a few). Challenges present a double-edged sword: On the one hand, the scale and reach the cloud provides enable massive scale, but also raise regional issues in terms of privacy, such as complying with GDPR, and related challenges when it comes to visibility (companies wouldn’t want to accidentally collect private information from the UK and then display it on a dashboard in Texas). Companies should look for monitoring tools that surface business-critical information in a way that doesn’t break any laws.
Evolution in cloud technology from the last decade culminated in containers, which in many ways exacerbated the challenges (for starters, there are more moving pieces to monitor). While studies conclude that container adoption has begun to plateau, the same can’t be said for technologies at the orchestration layer (aka, Kubernetes, for which native adoption is up 43%), which is where organizations should focus their investment. By moving up a level from packaging—as long as organizations interact with the orchestration layer in a consistent manner—it doesn’t matter how they package it. Another reason to focus on the orchestration layer is containers tend to present their own challenges when it comes to security.
While there are a number of different projects that try to make containers more secure, I predict we’ll see a shift to lightweight virtual machines (VMs), which take advantage of the security that comes with VMs and the efficiency and portability that containers offer. They’re light and portable enough to provide what Docker does today, but with the added benefit of proper security isolation. Although Amazon’s Firecracker was a bit slow to gain traction, we’ll see increased adoption in 2020; as Firecracker and other lightweight VMs become more established, companies will be able to make the transition to a more secure infrastructure without having to rewrite how code is deployed.
