Whatever shape they eventually take, streamlined internal platforms are clearly a direction for cloud infrastructure. “In the same way that today’s developers no longer think about individual servers, data centers, or operating systems, we are moving to a time when they can stop being concerned about their application capabilities and dependencies,” says Liam Randall, CEO of Cosmonic. “Just as they expect today’s public clouds to maintain their data centers, developers want their common application dependencies maintained by their platforms as well.”
According to Randall, WebAssembly will usher in the next phase of software abstraction and a new era beyond containerization. “Componentized applications [based on the WebAssembly Component Model] are compatible with container ecosystem concepts like service mesh, Kubernetes, and even containers themselves, but they are not dependent upon them,” says Randall. Components solve the cold start problem, they’re smaller than containers, they’re more secure, and they’re composable across language and language framework boundaries, he says.
Bringing virtualization to Kubernetes clusters
Another evolving area is inner-Kubernetes virtualization. “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 cloud computing costs, which continue to escalate with AI and machine learning workloads. In these scenarios, “sharing and dynamic allocation of computing resources is more important than ever,” he says.
