Cloud IaaS Predictions for 2022 from the Apache CloudStack Community

 

It's the beginning of the new year, and here the Apache CloudStack community shares its predictions about the state of open-source technology and the future of Cloud/IaaS. While some well-established trends (such as the migration to hybrid cloud environments and containerization) will continue in 2022, the potential for disruption caused by the ongoing pandemic will drive IT to accelerated change and improvement.

The Cloud/IaaS market is constantly evolving, and the ability to run workloads on Kubernetes, both on-premise and on public cloud infrastructure is vital to ensure business agility. Container-based cloud-native applications promise to deliver computing power independent of the cloud provider or hardware platform and is the biggest trend registered widely by users and the market, as there are changes in cultural and technological paradigms.

In terms of cloud management systems used to orchestrate Cloud/IaaS environments, the main goal for companies in 2022 is decreasing operational effort and thus costs. Providers will be looking for platforms that can increase their competitiveness and deliver predictable results while eliminating licensing and vendor lock-in.

Apache CloudStack follows the technology wave and responds to the user demand for innovation and improvement. As part of this strategy, it is integrating Kubernetes and extending IPv6 support in the latest versions. Huge progress has been made in the installation and upgrade processes, making Apache CloudStack even easier to maintain and operate.

In this article, we will echo the voice of our community and wait for 2022 to pass to see which of the following predictions will become mainstream.

 

Adoption of Open-source Technologies Will Continue to Grow

Building an open-source environment with Apache CloudStack is a future-proof strategy for many Cloud / IaaS providers. A lot of enterprises now have the challenge of consolidating different environments under the hood of a single orchestration platform while ensuring minimal downtime of production environments. The CloudStack community believes that open-source, lightweight technologies like Apache CloudStack will be adopted more and more by companies who want to achieve simplicity, improve performance and scale instantly when needed. 

 

- Wido den Hollander, CEO/CTO at CLouDINfra:

“My challenges for 2022 are migrating and adopting legacy infrastructure into our Cloud(Stack) environment. While keeping customer services up and running we want to achieve these goals. Having everything central in a single cloud management platform gives me better insight on our performance, capacity and expansion needs.”

- Boyan Ivanov, CEO, StorPool:

“The commoditization of IT started with the adoption of commodity hardware and open-source technologies like Linux & KVM in hyperscalers. It is increasingly pervasive and leading to the commoditizing of the storage industry. We are seeing the emergence of Software-Defined Storage and Software-Defined Networking (among many other things), which have now become the default technologies to use in greenfield projects or refresh scenarios.”

- Sven Vogel, Senior Manager R&D - Cloud and Infrastructure, EWERK:

“Today, many infrastructure deployments are using open-source technology as a key component.  Through 2025, more than 70% of enterprises will increase their IT spending on open-source software, compared with their current IT spending, and by 2025, 75% of application development teams will implement software composition analysis tools in their workflow, up from 40% today, in order to minimize the security and licensing risks associated with open-source software. Source: Gartner, Hype Cycle for Open-Source Software, 2021.

I share this assumption but I would also like to point out that more and more open-source projects hardly get any support. Many commercial companies are using OSS but it’s also important to understand that the industry needs to support the people who make the projects  live.”

– Giles Sirett, CEO, ShapeBlue:

“Open-source is here to stay - there is no better software model for innovation and long-term sustainability. However, far too many companies do not have a solid strategy on open-source. They use open-source software but do not understand the open-source model and how to engage in that model. The recent Log4J vulnerability demonstrated this perfectly. I expect to see many organisations finally thinking about how to properly run open-source in their environments and recognising that they can’t just install the software and forget”

 

Kubernetes

The approach to delivering microservices and containerized applications in recent years changed completely the way we design, develop, and run web applications. New principles enable developers to create cloud-native applications using Kubernetes which side-by-side with open-source, is a hot topic for most Apache CloudStack community members who share their visions.

- Gabriel Beims Bräscher, VP Apache CloudStack:

“We already see significant growth in deployed containerized workloads and there is no reason to believe in 2022 it won't be a big deal. CloudStack also has been moving towards providing Kubernetes containers. This could trigger providers to start planning their move towards "containers as a service" as well.”

- Rohit Yadav, Principal Engineer, ShapeBlue:

“Kubernetes managed container-based workloads are becoming the new norm, and multi-arch container builds (same apps built as containers that can run on both x86, aarch64 etc. architectures) becoming easily available for most apps/software/packages will make this change and migration easier. For the end-users/developers at large, it doesn't / won't matter what tech/arch their workloads are running on.”

- Kshitish Purohit, Chief Product Officer, IndiQus Technologies:

“Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure will slowly start edging out virtualisation and traditional orchestration. And as this demand for cloud-native infrastructure grows, the older 'enterprise' mindset will need to make way for decentralisation and autonomy.”

- Ezequiel McGovern - ARSAT:

“The new software solutions are implemented on container technology. With scaling, shared storage and high availability, we believe that this will lead to more common use of local hypervisor storage, allowing multizone solutions to be deployed without the need for the Cloud manager to perform additional tasks.”

 

COVID Impact on Cloud / IaaS providers

Since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, we have seen a real impact in terms of life and workstyle. Inevitably two industries have developed the most during the pandemic – healthcare and IT. With the growing demand for XaaS,

- Rohit Yadav, Principal Engineer, ShapeBlue:

“Due to covid, WFH and remote working have become the new norm, and are here for the long term. This means demand for everything to support this life (work) style will continue to grow, with an increased need for Data Centre and cloud resources. Providers in telecom, data centre, and cloud space will continue to cater to this growing demand.”

 

 ARM Platform

Recently, Apple introduced the ARM M1 processor as a replacement for Intel in its products, and KVM and VMware already support virtualization based on ARM processors. What’s next? Take a look at our predictions:

- Rohit Yadav, Principal Engineer, ShapeBlue:

“On the consumer front, most mobile and IoT devices are already ARM-based. Apple are leading the charge with their Mx series chips-based laptops and computers, and I think other manufacturers will follow (I think AMD should certainly consider grabbing this early market). We should see more ARM-based laptops in the next 5-10 yrs. More of these consumer devices means more developers will start using ARM-based computers to create apps, services, etc. that run on ARM and generate a requirement for more ARM-based servers/cloud providers. The strategy that will lead change is to build the ecosystem which is appearing to be working; a good business/developer benefit is that you'll write apps that will then run on mobile, IoT, laptop/consumer computers, and also in the cloud.”

 

Edge Computing, Blockchain and Green Cloud

The world's data is expected to grow 61% to 175 zettabytes by 2025. According to Gartner, around 10% of enterprise-generated data is created and processed outside a traditional centralized data center or cloud. By 2025, Gartner predicts that this figure will reach 75%. The increase of IoT devices at the edge of the network is producing a massive amount of data - storing and using all that data in cloud data centers pushes network bandwidth requirements to the limit.

- Kshitish Purohit, Chief Product Officer, IndiQus Technologies:

“Web3 is already here and 2022 is going to see a lot of movement happening in this space. The 'decentralised tech' landscape will find firmer ground as more understanding is built on the use of blockchains, edge and the likes. 2021 already saw this potential with big companies (and even governments) adopting these new technologies - crypto, AI, AR, metaverse etc. - and these are going to continue on an upward trend.”

- Gabriel Beims Bräscher, VP Apache CloudStack:

“We are still far from ideal "green" data centres, but this has become relevant in the past years. An example of the relevancy of this subject can be seen at the European Commission's Green cloud and green data centres policy. Additionally, studies show that moving companies' internal workloads to Cloud providers can reduce the CO2 footprint. In 2022 we might see more ideas and proposals on how to improve efficiency, reducing energy costs and CO2 footprint. It is still hard to apply academic studies to the industry, but 2022 might be a year where we start changing it.”

 

IPv6 Stack

The continued expansion of the internet relies on a greater number of IP addresses, and with the current limitation of the IPv4 stack, it is impossible to continue this expansion. The advent of cloud-native applications based on containerized microservices requires a relatively large number of public addresses, so the use of 128-bit IPv6 stacks that, theoretically allowing IP addresses, allows for continued expansion.

- Gabriel Beims Bräscher, VP Apache CloudStack:

“It is not news, IPv4 is reaching its limit. And each year we see companies and services being moved towards IPv6. This includes recent movements in Kubernetes 1.23 where Dual-stack IPv4 / IPv6 Networking has reached general availability (GA), in the last quarter of 2021.”

 

Market Dynamics

– Giles Sirett, CEO, ShapeBlue:

“The meteoritic growth in the IaaS market is well documented and predicted by most analysts to continue strongly through 2022. There are lots of different numbers flying around but most of the analysts seem to settle on a c.30% YoY growth for IaaS – taking it to near 100 billion markets in 2022.  Interestingly, the market share for the hyperscalers remains constant at about 80% - as much as most service providers would love to have some of that 80%, that still leaves a 20 billion growth market for everybody else.”

- Ezequiel McGovern - ARSAT:

“The concept of buying VMs will gradually change to buying Docker clusters (K8S) or similar solutions, so cloud managers have to prepare to provide services that are further away from the hypervisor.”

 

Private Cloud No More

The private or on-premise cloud allows a company to run workloads in their private data center. It is increasingly common to see companies migrating their workloads to cloud providers, thus reducing CAPEX-related costs. See the prediction on this topic below.

– Giles Sirett, CEO, ShapeBlue:

“For a decade, the term private cloud has been used to describe a set of orchestrated/automated infrastructure components to give users a “cloud-like” experience of their own internal infra. Increasingly, environments such as this are being used as the foundation for automation – they become part of the plumbing instead of the end goal itself. I’d therefore predict the term private-cloud starting to disappear from our lexicon.”

 

Hybrid Cloud

The use of multiple clouds, public and on-premise, allows operators to run applications based on containers in geographically dispersed locations of different providers, thus increasing the high availability of the applications and reducing the latency since, depending on the architecture, it allows operators to distribute the workloads to the cloud closest to the users using IP geolocation as well as edge clouds.

- Boyan Ivanov, CEO, StorPool:

Hybrid capabilities become crucial going forward – “Due to mixed environments and new workloads, storage complexity is increasing, not decreasing. So agility, portability, and well-documented APIs are now prime considerations when designing cloud-native applications. These applications should run on-premises and off-premises in the same manner but on different hardware and software stacks. So agility, flexibility, versatility, integrations and APIs become key KPIs of a storage solution, along with performance (think latency, IOPS, GB/S) and TCO (think Total Cost of Ownership, $/GB).”

 

Traditional SAN and Software-Defined-Storage

On the storage market, the innovations and SDS will continue steadily to replace legacy technologies. It's a natural case of evolution. By using API-compatible devices, you can control granular details like IOPs, snapshots and scaling without any headaches. The natural evolution of storage is software-defined storage (SDS), decoupling and abstracting storage resources from the underlying hardware platform for greater flexibility, efficiency and rapid scalability, making storage resources programmable and scalable.

- Boyan Ivanov, CEO, StorPool:

“The diversity from emerging applications puts strain on traditional, legacy SAN products and platforms. The storage solutions have been largely unchanged for the last three decades, except for the introduction of faster storage media (SSDs / NVMes) and extra data management software pieces (AI, anyone?) on top of the same underlying rigid architecture. Yet the large-scale, complex, and versatile IT platforms that power businesses today need a new generation of powerful and versatile storage platforms. These storage platforms can cover multiple use-cases, performance tiers, have API-first management, and linearly scale to sizes which were impossible with the traditional SAN architecture. Besides: who wants to buy and manage five different types of SAN / AFA family groups if they can have one or two best-in-class, latest generation SDS storage solutions?” 

- Ezequiel McGovern - ARSAT:

“Regarding the shared storage needs for classic solutions, the use of Ceph will be established, since it has shown in production that everything it promises is fulfilled in real life.”

 

Conclusion

The predictions seem clear and achievable. As a constantly developing software, Apache CloudStack follows the trends and evolves with the market needs. Apache CloudStack follows the open-source philosophy and has a strong and united community. It has recently been integrated with Kubernetes and extended IPv6 support for VPC and isolated networks. The Apache CloudStack use cases cover edge computing and hybrid cloud workloads. Besides that, the market for IaaS/Cloud will generate greater demand for hyperscalers, but also for service providers.