Now we're all Cloud Natives, what's next?

Presented at Container Days on September 11, 2023 in Hamburg, Germany.

The term "cloud native" gained currency in 2015 with the founding of the CNCF and the launch of Kubernetes 1.0. Since then, it has matured from a cutting-edge innovation to the industry standard for how software is developed and deployed. In this session, two of the industry's early pioneers (the co-founders of Project Calico, and now part of the cloud native teams at Cisco and Microsoft) review the current state of cloud native, how we got here, and how things might evolve.

Transcript

1. Now we’re all Cloud Natives,
   what’s next?
   Andrew Randall, Principal PM Manager, Microsoft
   Christopher Liljenstolpe, Heretical Product Manager, Cisco
   11 September 2023 @ahrkrak
   @liljenstolpe
   hachyderm.io/@ahrkrak
   hachyderm.io/@liljenstolpe
   

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3. This wasn’t always the way
   😲
   

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4. Technology Diffusion (Rogers & Moore)
   

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5. Types of Innovation (Christensen)
   Sustaining
   Incremental improvement on
   existing product
   Extends an existing market
   Disruptive
   Challenges existing business model
   Lower-end, lower-cost product
   and/or creates entirely new market
   

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6. The Road to Cloud Native
   IaaS
   AWS EC2
   Open Source PaaS
   CloudFoundry
   PaaS
   Heroku
   2010
   2006
   2009
   2010
   2011
   Cloud | Ubiquitous broadband + mobile
   Open Source IaaS
   OpenStack & CloudStack
   Virtualization
   VMware
   Open Source Virtualization
   Xen, KVM
   2005
   2001
   2004 2006
   Virtualization, Growth of Internet
   2005
   Zones
   Solaris 10
   2000
   Jails
   FreeBSD 4.0
   Non-virtualized Hardware, Early Internet
   IBM PC
   + MS-DOS
   Linux
   Sun-3
   SunOS 2.0
   2000
   1981
   1985
   1991
   1995
   World Wide Web
   Netscape, Windows 95
   1995
   Java
   NSFNet
   !AUP
   1992
   

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7. The Cloud Native Era
   Cloud Native Maturation | Ubiquitous digitalization
   2016
   eBPF+XDP
   Cilium
   2016 2017
   Service Mesh
   Linkerd, Istio
   Serverless Wasm
   Cloudflare Workers
   2018
   2020
   Wasm in K8s
   Krustlet
   2017
   Web Assembly
   WASM/WASI
   Serverless K8s
   Knative
   2018 2018
   Arm64 IaaS
   Graviton
   Standardized
   Observability
   OpenTelemetry
   2019
   2015
   Package
   Management
   Helm
   2020
   Containers
   Docker, CoreOS+etcd
   2013
   Orchestration
   Mesos[phere], Kubernetes
   2015
   2014
   Serverless
   Lambda
   Cloud Native Foundations | 4G
   2015
   Foundation
   CNCF
   2015
   2013
   

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9. “Kubernetes is a reflection of
   solving problems for people”
   - Kris Nóva, in Cloud Native Rejekts Podcast
   

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10. Source: Gartner, Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologie, August 2023
    

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11. Three Themes
    Artificial
    Intelligence
    Pervasive
    Cloud
    Developer
    Experience
    

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12. Artificial Intelligence
    

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13. AI impact on productivity
    0.3%
    55%
    Annual productivity growth
    from 1850 to 1910
    46%
    Faster
    coding
    Code
    written
    Watt double-acting steam engine, built 1832
    $1.5tn
    Estimated
    GDP impact
    

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14. AI impact on happiness
    59%
    60%
    Less frustrated
    when coding
    More fulfilled
    with my job
    74%
    Focus on more
    satisfying work
    “(With Copilot) I have to think less, and when I have to think it's the fun stuff.
    It sets off a little spark that makes coding more fun and more efficient.”
    — Senior Software Engineer
    73%
    More in the
    flow
    Source: A Year In, GitHub Measures AI-Based Copilot's Productivity Boost -- Visual Studio Magazine
    

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15. AI impact on Cloud Native?
    https://kubernetes.io/case-studies/openai/
    https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2018/01/22/openai-masters-scale-kubernetes-azure
    https://openai.com/research/scaling-kubernetes-to-7500-nodes
    Cloud Native as a
    platform for AI
    workloads
    • Drives demand for
    GPU capacity,
    scale, efficiency
    • E.g. OpenAI scaled
    up to 7,500 K8s
    nodes per cluster
    in Azure
    Enable
    AI-powered
    applications
    • Innovation
    • Competitiveness
    Simplified
    operations
    ● Improve operator
    satisfaction
    Enabler of scale,
    efficiency and
    optimized
    architectures
    ● Smarter, real-time
    optimization
    decisions
    

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16. Demo Time
    

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17. kubectl-ai
    https://github.com/sozercan/kubectl-ai
    Kube Copilot
    https://github.com/feiskyer/kube-copilot
    

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18. Some Cautions
    Some aspects of AI (such as LLM
    training) is incredibly resource
    consumptive
    • In some cases rack power densities are
    increasing by an order of magnitude in
    the space of 2-3 years.
    • This, and the matching cooling load,
    will collide immediately with ESG
    goals.
    CUDA is, for all intents and
    purposes, a single vendor API
    • The vast majority of software
    requires CUDA
    • We are possibly walking into
    another single vendor API
    monoculture.
    • This Is Not The Way
    

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19. Pervasive Cloud
    

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20. Evolution of Cloud Locality
    Public cloud
    (continental regions,
    e.g. us-east-1)
    Regional cloud
    Sovereign clouds
    Multi-cloud
    Industry clouds
    Edge and IOT
    On-premises
    Public cloud
    Space
    

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21. Pervasive cloud implies heterogeneous compute
    architectures (which will continue to evolve)
    CPU/GPU arch. True run anywhere Loosely coupled
    Constrained
    environments
    Lightweight functions
    close to data
    

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22. We’re not in Seattle any more, Toto
    This isn’t the infinitely elastic
    hyperscale world in which Cloud
    Native was born and grew up
    Many assumptions will change
    

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23. Evolution of unit of code deployment
    Binary package
    manually deployed
    in a machine of
    unknown state
    Desktop /
    pet server
    VM image
    Data Center /
    IaaS
    (+)
    Container
    Cloud Native
    (+)
    Wasm Module
    Pervasive Cloud
    (+)
    

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24. “If WASM+WASI existed in 2008, we
    wouldn’t have needed to create
    Docker. That’s how important it is.
    Webassembly on the server is the
    future of computing.”
    - Solomon Hykes
    co-founder, Docker
    

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25. Developer Experience
    

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26. Modernizing Software Development is Key to
    Digital Transformation
    Source: Adapted from Gartner Predicts 2022 and Gartner Future of Cloud 2027
    2020 Drivers 2025
    60%
    of new event-driven apps
    Serverless computing is niche Re-architecting applications to
    be cloud native
    Serverless goes mainstream due
    to elasticity & low ops overhead
    75%
    of orgs with platform teams
    Disjointed dev tools create a
    bumpy road to production
    Increased focus on developer
    experience
    Self-service developer portals
    create paved road to prod
    30%
    of large enterprises
    Locally installed IDEs Anywhere access to
    development workspaces
    Browser-based IDEs (e.g. GitHub
    Codespaces, Gitpod)
    60%
    of organizations
    Development environments
    assumed safe, are unprotected
    Supply chain security risks Securing development
    environments is a key priority
    70%
    of new cloud-native apps
    Monitoring via proprietary SDKs
    and agents
    Developer-centric observability
    practices
    White-box observability using
    OpenTelemetry instrumentation
    Most apps built by software
    developers writing code
    Accelerated innovation led by
    business technologists
    Apps built with low/no-code
    tools, by non-traditional devs
    70%
    of new apps
    

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27. What does a developer portal look like?
    https://backstage.io/
    ● Software catalog
    ● Templates
    ● Service discovery
    & management
    ● Plug-ins
    

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28. Concluding Thoughts
    The future of cloud-based app development and deployment will be
    Characterized by a more streamlined, automated, enjoyable,
    productive developer and operator experience
    Driven by AI
    Deployed in heterogeneous environments, with data and
    compute optimally (and potentially dynamically) located for
    efficiency, performance, cost, and regulatory needs
    

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29. Danke.
    This presentation is dedicated to Kris Nóva.
    

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