What we need is cloud for the masses. We’ve failed to realize almost all the heady projections about cloud computing, not because cloud computing couldn’t have met them, but because we couldn’t meet cloud computing on a reasonable footing. Fortunately, that’s starting to change. The most profound thing going on in the cloud today isn’t technology advance, it’s populism.
Every advance we’ve had in the cloud, from web services to serverless to containers to Kubernetes to service mesh, has increased the capability of the cloud while also increasing the complexity associated with development and deployment. That web publications don’t get the technology is a given, but what’s truly interesting is that enterprises don’t get it either. I noted earlier this week that operators were struggling with what “cloud-native” meant, and enterprises are struggling even more.
I’ve recounted my experience with CIOs and senior development people many times in my blogs. They aren’t charged with assessing all the leading-edge technical issues and developments, but to keep the applications their company’s business depends on running, and cheaply. When somebody promises a revolution, they might be intellectually curious about it, but their mission isn’t to drive tech revolutions, but to respond to business revolutions. In technology terms, they look for things they can adopt for which they can make a strong business case. They look for products.
In one of my recent enterprise exchanges, I was told by a technology planner that “My company doesn’t want adopt technologies, they want to adopt products.” That seems pretty obvious on the face; you buy products, install them, and use them, and that’s how IT has worked for generations. The problem we have starts with the fact that the technologies are what get the ink, and it ends with the fact that the association between business goals, technologies, and products is getting very difficult to navigate.
Kubernetes is a great example of technology-ink-getting strength. You can’t read anything about application development or operations today without reading about Kubernetes, so it’s pretty obvious that if you’re a vendor who’s promoting a set of development/deployment tools, you’d better be talking Kubernetes somewhere. Kubernetes, of course, is open-source and so it’s hardly a big differentiator. Further, users agree that it’s complex, and experts agree that it’s important in no small part because it’s the center of a growing ecosystem. The “Kubernetes ecosystem” is just starting to emerge as a technology in itself, and yet it’s already morphing into a “cloud-native ecosystem.” Imagine how enterprise technologists feel!
Why do we have this confusion? Enterprises say that the “ecosystem” model emerged over the last year because of a split in the necessary feature-function-benefit approach to sales. Business start at the “benefit” side of the chain, vendors at the “feature” end, and they meet (hopefully, eventually) in the function-in-the-middle. Container technology generated a lot of features that enterprises frankly didn’t understand well. Eventually, as enterprise questions and concerns created a better vision of how containers might be applied, vendors started pushing a combination of tools that aligned better with specific IT functions. At the same time, this helped enterprises visualize how functions would benefit them, how an ROI would be generated.
We know now, for example, that containers are a new application development and hosting models. You write container-optimized applications, and you deploy them on arbitrary resources using an orchestration tool like Kubernetes. If you can make Kubernetes work across your resource set, you can make containers work. We also know that as you broaden the choice in resources, adding public cloud to the data center, you necessarily remix your application design process to take advantage of the cloud as well as containers. The fusion of cloud and containers is the foundation of the notion of an ecosystem-as-an-offering.
The ultimate in that fusion is cloud-native. While containers allow for elastic, agile, deployment, scaling, and redeployment, realizing that with basic Kubernetes alone still leaves a lot of custom work to do. The addition of stuff like service mesh (Istio) and serverless (Knative) go a long way toward submerging the complexity of cloud-native into the tool ecosystem. Kubernetes ecosystems, as “functions”, have presented cloud-native in a productized (or productizable) form. In that form, enterprises are starting to understand the benefits, and so we have the beginning of the realization of real sales potential here.
Sales, of course, implies vendors to make them. Does the cloud-native ecosystem then spell the death of open-source populism? Yeah, it sort of does, not that there ever really was such a thing. Open source is a technology-development model that eliminates vendor differentiation, but it didn’t (and doesn’t) eliminate vendors. Users need more than just a pretty picture of the future. They need a blueprint for achieving it, and for that a casual open community is unlikely to serve. You need vendors, because you need products.
The two vendors who are leading the productization charge here are IBM/Red Hat and VMware. Both companies have the strong open-source, cloud-centric, mindset needed to pull together the right pieces. Of the two, I think VMware has the clearest internal vision, which isn’t surprising given that IBM’s credentials are divided between the personnel and management of two very different firms just recently semi-joined by M&A. I also think that among the cloud providers, Google has the best understanding of where things are going, and so it forms a kind of third player in the productization game.
The war of words between IBM/Red Hat and VMware, already visible, is clear evidence of the stakes in this new game. The cloud, and cloud-native, has the potential for adding a trillion dollars a year to overall IT spending. In the hosting, software, and virtual networking space, it could increase vendor revenues by 50%. Given all the buying pressure we see in the market, this is big news indeed, and it’s why IBM bought Red Hat and why VMware has been on an M&A tear of its own to build up its cloud-native assets.
But if, as many say, cloud-native is really complicated, something even network operators can’t get their heads around, isn’t a focus on cloud-native ecosystem-building counterproductive? Aren’t vendors likely to be mired in long sales cycles and education commitments? No, because we’re reaching that feature-function-benefit meet-in-the-middle point. Buyers are seeing, in the new ecosystems, that product they’ve longed for, a manifestation of cloud technology that you can touch, that you can install.
IBM and VMware are coming at this from very different places. IBM has enormous enterprise sales influence, a presence in major accounts that’s the envy of many competitors, but they have fairly fossilized views of applications and data centers, and virtually no historic presence in cloud-native technology. Their Kabanero announcement this summer was their first credible excursion into ecosystem-building. VMware has a good customer base, but more in the VM than the container area, but they obviously know what a cloud-native ecosystem looks like and they’re buying up the pieces at a time when their value hasn’t been recognized.
The competition between these two companies, and the likelihood that others, like HPE and Microsoft, will earnestly join in, is good for the cloud, the users, and the industry overall. We can’t hope for full cloud success if cloud-native technology is an arcane discipline attended by robed acolytes and accompanied by mystic rituals. This has to be a mass-market technology, something that’s as readily adopted as servers and even PCs, for cloud-native and the cloud to realize its full potential. The creation of vendor ecosystems is a big step. Yes, one-stop shops are often seen as invitations to lock-in, but absent some group of people framing the cloud for widespread use, there’s nothing happening at all.
So far, everything that’s critical to cloud-native is open-source, and that prevents true proprietary lock-in from happening. It doesn’t mean that some vendors might not assemble so compelling a set of tools, backed by such incredible planning insight and pre- and post-sale support, that they couldn’t run away with the market and create a dynasty. Is that the price of fully realizing the cloud? What open-source has always lacked was marketing.
Some will say open-source and cloud-native don’t need marketing, don’t need vendor support or productization. They’ll cite Linux, but the example of Linux, which wasn’t marketed in a product sense, isn’t a good one because Linux became a household word because hardware vendors needed an OS for their servers. What pulls the cloud-native technology future through into the present? It’s going to take marketing and education. The growing ecosystem-building product focus of key vendors shows we may be on the verge of getting what the cloud needs.