Whatever form it ultimately takes, streamlined internal platforms are clearly the direction of cloud infrastructure. “Just as today’s developers no longer think about individual servers, data centers or operating systems, we’re moving toward an era where they no longer have to worry about application functionality and dependencies,” says Liam Randall, CEO of Cosmonic. “Just as they expect today’s public clouds to maintain their data centers, developers want their platforms to maintain common application dependencies.”
According to Randall, WebAssembly will usher in the next era of software abstraction and a new era beyond containerization. “Componentized applications (based on the WebAssembly component model) are compatible with, but do not depend on, concepts of the container ecosystem, such as service meshes, Kubernetes, and even containers themselves,” Randall says. He says components solve the cold start problem, are smaller and more secure than containers, and are composable across language and language framework boundaries.
Introducing Virtualization to Kubernetes Clusters
Another evolving area is virtualization within Kubernetes. “The same paradigm that drove hardware virtualization for Linux servers is now being applied to Kubernetes,” says Lukas Gentele, CEO and co-founder of Loft Labs. One reason is to address the ever-increasing cost of cloud computing driven by AI and machine learning workloads. In these scenarios, “sharing and dynamic allocation of compute resources is more important than ever,” he says.
