5 min read
Over the last year, we're seeing yet another massive transformation in how software is delivered take hold. I will call this a “Paradigm Shift” – containers are replacing virtual machines as the fundamental unit of software delivery at an unprecedented rate.
Over the last year, we're seeing yet another massive transformation in how software is delivered take hold. I will call this a “Paradigm Shift” – containers are replacing virtual machines as the fundamental unit of software delivery at an unprecedented rate.
Apparently, Moore’s Law applies to the rate of adoption of new technologies as much as it does the density of transistors. The adoption rate of public cloud adoption is twice that of what we saw with Virtual Machines, and now we're seeing the same thing with container adoption. Enterprises are interesting species to study because they are the slowest to move and therefore a consistent barometer of change. Enterprises are learning to be more tolerant of change—this an awesome trend.
What are the ingredients for a paradigm shift? Let’s begin by looking at a few examples.
The concept of “Virtual Machines” had been around since the 60s, but it took until the late 90s for the technology to catch up. It wasn’t until VMware came out with their “VMware Workstation” product in 1998 that the concept got popularized and we saw mass adoption. What did they do? They made it easy—first and foremost for developers to run multiple environments on their desktops. Then they conquered the enterprise with tools.
The other prime example is “Cloud Computing.” It was not a new concept, it’s just that no one had really cracked the nut to show us how to do it properly. That was until Amazon came along. With EC2 they made it accessible and showed us the possibilities; they let us write infrastructure as code. The possibilities blew our minds! So everyone tried to copy what Amazon did, but unfortunately, it was a little too late.
That's because now we have the container movement. The concept of “Containers” is also nothing new. In Linux, the core functionality has existed since 2008 when Google contributed their work on LXC – the technology behind containers – to the Linux Kernel. However, it wasn’t until Docker came along circa 2013 (5 years later!) and made it brain-dead easy for developers to run them that we started seeing an uptick in their adoption. Now Docker is taking a page out of VMware's playbook by following up with Enterprise tools for production with the release of the Universal Container Platform (“UCP”) & and the Docker Datacenter (“DDC”).
The secret?
- Make it easy.
- Target developers.
- Let percolate throughout the enterprise until resistance is futile.
In the wake of all these transitions is some collateral damage. These are shims or training wheels we used to get from bare metal to containers. It's the result of the natural process of innovation.
- A dozen or more hypervisor technologies like VMware, Zen, KVM will lose massive market share.
- Elaborate Configuration Management tools like Puppet and Chef that were created to address the broken ways we used to configure software (basically emulated what humans would do by hand) will no longer be needed because we don’t write software as broken anymore.
- EC2 private-cloud knockoffs like OpenStack, vCloud, Eucalyptus, CloudStack, etc that were designed to run your own private cloud on-prem like Amazon, now overkill or at the very least passé (R.I.P.)
So why is the move to containers happening so quickly?
Hint: It’s not strictly technological.
First, we can agree that the second iteration is easier, better, and faster than the first anytime we iterate. Simply put, everything is less scary the second time around. Moving from the classic “bare metal” paradigm to a “virtualized” one was a massive endeavor. It was the “first” major paradigm shift of its kind. It took convincing of both C-Level execs and wrangling of Operations teams. Since it was a foreign concept, there was severe skepticism and pushback at all stages. Flash forward 15 years later, and there’s now fresh blood at the top. There’s a new guard who has moved up through the ranks that’s more accepting of new technology. Enterprises have gotten better at accepting change. Moreover, the tools of the trade have improved. We’re better at writing software — software that is more cloud friendly (aka “cloud native”).
Here are my predictions for what we'll see over the next few years.
- Containers will become first-class citizens, replacing VMs as the defacto unit of the cloud.
- If you still need a VM, that’s cool; you’ll have a couple options:
- Leverage a VM running inside a container. There's a project by Rancher called “VM Containers” which does exactly this. Sound absurd? Not to Google. They run their entire Public Cloud – VMs & all – on top of Borg.
- Use Clear Containers by Intel which have minimal overhead, full machine-level isolation and can leverage the VT technology of modern CPU chipsets. Not to mention, it's fully Open Source!
- The brave will attempt using some sort of Unikernel, but it’s still too early to know for sure if that will be the way to go.
- Interest behind OpenStack (et al) will wane, and innovation will cease – they were ahead of their time. We learned A LOT from the experience – both what worked well and what didn't. As a result, we'll see a significant brain drain, with key contributors moving over to the Kubernetes camp.
- Kubernetes will replace OpenStack du jour and as a result we'll see a resurgence of bare-metal in the Enterprise
- Amazon’s ECS will be EOL’d and replaced with offerings of Kubernetes & Swarm.
- Kubernetes and Swarm will be battling it out for #1 because the competition is good.
- The best features of Mesos will be cherry-picked by both Kubernetes & Swarm, but Mesos will fail to gain a bigger foothold in the market.
