What’s going to happen in 2018? No really knows, but people love predicting things this time of year. We can’t resist it so dip out toes in the same game and review some predictions from our friends at Gartner as well. Plus, a smattering of infrastructure software news and recommendations.

Pre-roll SDT news & hype

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Predictions

• Coté, of course, used to do these: the last one, for 2015, at 451; 2009 at RedMonk (boy, I sure was full of piss and vinegar back then); some nonsense from 2014;
• Coté: DevOps → SRE.
• Coté: I met someone who described themselves as a “chatbot developer” last week. The future is so bright I gotta wear shades.
• Ducy’s predictions.
• Return to monoliths.

Survey of predictions from elsewhere

• Good God, man! - something about the role of AI in appdev.
• “AIOps” - please, kill me now. (To be fair, I think it down-shifts to ML pretty quick-like. Still)
• Gartner’s mode-salad: “Through 2020, n-tier bimodal workloads will encompass 50% of existing Mode 1 workloads and 80% of new Mode 2 workloads.”
  • I think this means: “50% of old applications will be n-tier, and 80% of new apps will be n-tier,” where “n-tier” means not “client/server, hosted and peer-to-peer architectures.”
• Serverless, Gartner: “By 2020, 90% of serverless deployments will occur outside the purview of I&O organizations when supporting general-use patterns.”
• This decade in kubernetes, Gartner: “By 2020, more than 50% of enterprises will run mission-critical, containerized cloud-native applications in production, up from less than 5% today.”
• Gartner’s PaaS PDF, someone over there had an SEO-stroke: “Application leaders engaged in digital business transformation must master AI, event-driven design, serverless microservices, IoT and strategic integration to serve their business and customers well. Cloud platform innovation drives business leadership.”
• A good passage on why private PaaS is hard, from PaaS predictions piece: “These [positive, PaaS] capabilities benefit the organizations and are a positive IT development. But they do not alone amount to a cloud experience. Their challenge is typically organizational. A private cloud requires a division of the IT organization into provider and subscribers, and establishment of a strict separation between them via a cloud services portal and suitable cross-charging model. Without a strict adherence to the isolation of providers and subscribers, there cannot be standardization. The self-service is compromised and without resource use tracking, it is hard to achieve the efficiency of elastic autoscaling and elimination of shelf-ware. In most organizations, the leadership is not committed enough to the vision of private cloud to make the difficult and high-risk investment that can stand up to the right organizational framework, policies and practices. Therefore, these PaaS frameworks have justifed their existence mostly through their support of newer cloud-native development models such as DevOps, rather than cloudiness features.”

Relevant to your interests

• Shameless Self Promotion: best digital transformation joke of the year.
• Tech M&A prioritization, rough overview from 451:

• Forrester Researcher: Containers, PaaS And Managed Private Cloud Will Drive Cloud Adoption Next Year And Beyond - "It’s a waiting game for a comprehensive management platform."
• IDC predicts that in 2018, annual IaaS/PaaS service spending (OpEx) will be equal to new on prem infrastructure spending (CapEx) - “They” say public cloud will over-take private cloud in 2019. Meanwhile: "In 2018, we expect 40% to 50% of business users to have moved their core collaboration and communications systems to cloud platforms. By 2021, more than 70% of businesses will be substantially provisioned with cloud office capabilities.”

Last minute gift ideas

• Brandon: subscriptions like Spotify, NY Times - no one will do it though, no one wants to give this.
• Matt: experiences.
• Coté: cash for kids, trialling this year.

Conferences, et. al.

• Jan 16th, 2018 - live SDT recording at CloudAustin on Jan 16th, 2018, Coté, Brandon, Tasty Meats Paul.
• May 15th to 18th, 2018 - Coté talking EA at Continuous Lifecycle London.

Recommendations

• Matt: Sigur Rós live from the Walt Disney Concert Hall, other Pitchfork concerts
• Brandon: United States Postal Service.
• Coté: Coté’s DIY Home Office Trail Mix (pea-con pieces & raisons); stock CostCo bacon; the only way to suffer through reading a pile of predictions pieces is listening to Yacht Rock Vol. 1. Co-pilot for all the tedious times in life. (Cf. Vol. 2 and Vol. 3.)