Maximum Velocity
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| As 2017 draws to a close, we’re already looking ahead to the new year with an eye on the challenges you’ll face, the tools you’ll use, and the strategies you’ll employ to build distributed systems that are robust, secure, and increasingly performant—all topics we cover at our annual Velocity conference.
We asked members of the 2018 Velocity program committee for their take on the tools and trends that will be changing how you work in the new year. Below you’ll find the insights that I believe will have the greatest impact on the community in the year ahead. Whether you agree or disagree, please reach out and let me know what you think. And from all of us at O’Reilly, we wish you a happy and safe holiday season!
Happy Holidays!
Nikki McDonald | @nikkimc
Content Director, Web Ops
Chair, Velocity |
Networking the Edge
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| This year was all about the cloud as enterprises continued their migration to public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud infrastructures to compete with agile, cloud-native competitors who can scale quickly at less cost. But next year, Fastly’s Senior Communications Manager Elaine Greenberg expects we’ll see more companies moving their networks closer to the edge.
“Businesses that were previously just making the move to the cloud are beginning to move more of their app logic to the edge (closer to the end user), in new and interesting ways, in order to support speed and scale,” says Greenberg. “We are seeing more and more content about the edge, what exactly it means, and how edge computing is distinct from the more generic ‘serverless’ initiative, especially in the context of IoT and AI scalability. With large cloud vendors investing more effort into edge tooling, there is a growing interest in understanding and leveraging distributed systems work at the edge.” |
Kubernetes Domination
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| Kubernetes came into its own in 2017 and its popularity will only continue to grow in 2018. Edward Muller, engineering manager at Salesforce, predicts that building tools on top of Kubernetes is going to be more and more prevalent next year. “Previously, most tooling targeted one or more cloud infrastructure APIs,” says Edward. “Recent announcements of Kubernetes as a Service (KaaS?) from major cloud providers is likely to only hasten the shift.” |
Evolution of the Service Mesh
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| One trend to watch out for next year will be to see how service meshes evolve—or as imgix engineer Cindy Sridharan calls it, “the proxy wars.” She says, “Envoy, Linkerd, NGINX Plus, and HAProxy are all in this space now and are rapidly developing new features to make them first-class citizens in the cloud native ecosystem. It’ll be interesting to see how these tools evolve in conjunction with Kubernetes.” Expect to hear a lot more about Istio in 2018. And, Cindy adds, "As the service mesh architecture gains more traction, expect to hear more about the failure modes of the mesh itself as well as best practices to test, deploy, operate, and debug the mesh and/or its configuration better." |
Serverless Monitoring
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| While most organizations are still trying to figure out where and how to use serverless, the general consensus is not if organizations will embrace serverless, but when. The New York Times CTO Nick Rockwell believes serverless is underhyped and that we’re on the way to a largely serverless world. When that time comes, we’ll need to have a process for monitoring large-scale serverless apps, says Arun Kejariwal, statistical learning principal for MZ Inc. “A key focus going forward would be to determine the ‘most’ relevant metrics—number of invocations, errors, memory usage, duration, etc.—to monitor and carrying out analytics on them,” says Arun. “The latter would be particularly challenging owing to the ephemeral nature of the function invocations. A systematic approach to serverless monitoring would be the bedrock for ensuring high efficiency and performance.” |
A Little More to the Left
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| Nicole Forsgren, CEO and chief scientist at DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), is the lead investigator on the State of DevOps Report and an expert on the factors that result in high-performing teams. Based on her work with the industry, Nicole expects organizations to push for ever-faster feedback cycles, which will take the form of “continuing to shift left: security, data, and improved continuous testing. It’s having dramatic improvements in tempo, reliability, and quality.” |
Chaos and Intuition Engineering
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| In 2017, organizations began to embrace how Chaos Engineering can bring stability to your distributed systems and it’s likely to become an even more accepted practice as engineers work to make their increasingly complex systems more robust. Netflix’s Manager of Traffic and Chaos Teams, Casey Rosenthal, points out that, “Related disciplines like Intuition Engineering demonstrate the need to navigate the uncertainty inherent in complex systems, rather than trying to reduce complexity. As an industry, we are moving into technologies (deep learning, machine learning, microservices, autonomous operations) where it is increasingly likely that we will be dealing with complex systems, where introspection into how something works is less important during the development and support cycle than whether it works.” |
Observability Hits the Mainstream
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| Observability isn’t yet widely known, but Baron Schwartz, CEO at database performance monitoring company VividCortex, thinks observability will go from niche to mainstream buzzword next year. "Every monitoring vendor is going to market around observability, even when they are just old-school monitoring in a new skin," Baron predicts. "Observability is the property or attribute of a system that makes it possible to understand and operate better, and in that sense observability has real value. But monitoring companies are going to be jumping on this bandwagon so fast it’ll make your head spin. This is likely to create a lot of confusion about what observability really is, but it’ll also spark a vital conversation. We need to promote engineering culture that values highly instrumented systems and data-driven decision-making. Observability will help highlight that."
We hope this inspires you to submit a talk of your own for one of next year’s Velocity conferences and we look forward to seeing you in San Jose, New York, or London in 2018.
Best wishes for a bright and peaceful new year! |
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Trends & Events for App and Web Developers 