The cloud-native group at Solstice has compiled a list of the 6 most important trends that we see taking hold in 2018.

1. 1
PROPRIETARY & CONFIDENTIAL
solstice.com
SOLSTICE
CLOUD-NATIVE
FORECAST
2018

2. CLOUD-NATIVE
FORECAST 2018:
6 TRENDS
2
PROPRIETARY & CONFIDENTIAL
solstice.com
1.
2.
3.
5.
4.
6.
There’s a Cloud for That:
Abstracting Multi-Cloud with PCF
K8s for Everyone:
Containerization & Orchestration
Google Becomes Your Next Data Center:
GCP in the Enterprise
When Less is More:
DevOps on the Rise
The New Enterprise Developer:
Reactive Programming & Serverless
Insights from on High:
AI/ML in the Cloud

3. 3
PROPRIETARY & CONFIDENTIAL
solstice.com
There’s a Cloud for That:
ABSTRACTING
MULTI-CLOUD
WITH PCF

4. PROPRIETARY & CONFIDENTIAL
solstice.com
Around 45% of
enterprises employ
multi-cloud solutions
Almost half of enterprises today
leverage multiple cloud providers,
according to this survey by 451
Research. While most of these multi-
cloud instances today are used for
hosted cloud solutions, enterprises are
increasingly looking to try out new
clouds for application development
use. We expect a sharper rise in multi-
cloud enterprise environments in 2018.
PCF broadens
provider supports
Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry product
continues to be the best cloud
abstraction in the market. Pivotal recently
introduced support for Kubernetes, beta
support for Azure stack, and a new PCF
Quickstart for AWS. As the platform
evolves, its core tenant of portability
remains its most popular feature. Also, as
Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and others
continue to price their cloud platforms
aggressively, these price wars could lead
to provider swapping in 2018 and
beyond.
Retirement of
legacy apps &
infrastructure
Increased security compliance and
high platform maintenance & licensing
costs are driving the retirement of
legacy apps and infrastructure within
the enterprise. Most legacy apps are
being replaced by cloud-native apps
using microservice, 12-factor
architectures which are built cloud-first
and infrastructure agnostic, thus easing
the transfer of these apps across
multiple cloud environments.
There’s a Cloud for That:
ABSTRACTING MULTI-CLOUD WITH PCF
4

5. 5
PROPRIETARY & CONFIDENTIAL
solstice.com
There’s a Cloud for That:
ABSTRACTING MULTI-CLOUD WITH PCF
So what?
Enterprises can shop around for multiple cloud hosting environments and leverage
technologies like PCF and 12-factor architectures to provide a common layer that simplifies
migration between providers. This is a win-win for CTO and infrastructure teams— they
can deliver more capabilities to their customers while also driving better cost efficiencies.
Joe Nedumgottil Cloud-Native Architect
@jnedum

6. 6
PROPRIETARY & CONFIDENTIAL
solstice.com
K8s for Everyone:
CONTAINERIZATION
& ORCHESTRATION

7. 7
PROPRIETARY & CONFIDENTIAL
solstice.com
K8s for Everyone:
CONTAINERIZATION & ORCHESTRATION
Applications for
K8s Multi/Hybrid-
Cloud Management
2018 will see a larger introduction of
applications for managing multi-cloud
and hybrid-cloud models supporting
Kubernetes. At Solstice we’ve seen
cloud provider specific applications for
managing features such as logging,
scaling, and monitoring. We expect to
see an abstraction of these provider
specific types of applications as well as
new classes of applications to handle
K8s multi/hybrid-cloud models.
Diversity in the
Cloud and a Larger
K8s Footprint
We expect to see an increased
demand for “choice” among
consumers for diversity in the
cloud, as K8s support rises in
cloud vendors (i.e. PCF 2.0/PKS).
As an effect, consumers will be
able to break away from and/or
avoid vendor lock-in scenarios.
Increased
Maturity and
Adoption
2018 will see a rise in maturity
among cloud vendors as well as
consumers. Specifically in areas
such as security, portability (i.e.
porting to/from between cloud
vendors) and cloud agnostic
tooling (i.e. Istio).

8. 8
PROPRIETARY & CONFIDENTIAL
solstice.com
So what?
In 2018, we expect to see enterprises continue to shift away from vendor lock-in, as they will
be empowered to leverage K8s between multiple cloud vendors and bare-metal with little to
no restrictions. Enterprises will be in a position where if they’ve already modernized or are just
beginning to modernize their infrastructure, they can start taking next steps towards
customizing their own cloud infrastructure how they see fit.
Keun Lee Cloud-Native Architect
@keunlee
K8s for Everyone:
CONTAINERIZATION & ORCHESTRATION

9. 9
PROPRIETARY & CONFIDENTIAL
solstice.com
Google Becomes Your
Next Data Center:
GCP IN THE
ENTERPRISE

10. 10
PROPRIETARY & CONFIDENTIAL
solstice.com
Google Becomes Your Next Data Center:
GCP IN THE ENTERPRISE
Google is already a
core component within
your organization
Google and Pivotal
partnership grows
stronger
GCP AI/ML ahead
of the competition
Over the last 5 years Google has
actively sought to win over the
enterprise with tools like G-Suite and
Google Analytics. Today, Google’s
enterprise offering includes Google
Cloud Platform (GCP), along with
popular open source tooling created by
Google such as Kubernetes. As time has
passed, Google has slowly found ways
to become part of the enterprise. We
see this trend accelerating in 2018.
It’s evident that Pivotal and Google share
many of the same values and ideas in the
cloud-native computing space. Pivotal
Cloud Foundry’s upcoming 2.0 release
contains numerous points of
collaboration between Pivotal and
Google including:
• PKS (Pivotal Container Service) co-
developed by Pivotal/VMWare in
partnership with Google Cloud
• GCP Service Broker Tile: allows for PCF
access to native GCP services
Although it’s debatable which cloud
platform will win the cloud AI/ML wars,
its easy to see that Google’s AI/ML
offering is wider and deeper than its
primary counterparts. We see this gap
between Google and its competition to
remain the same or widen in 2018. While
the MLaaS battles are far from over,
Google remains in the lead and that will
attract enterprises to its cloud platform.

11. 11
PROPRIETARY & CONFIDENTIAL
solstice.com
Google Becomes Your Next Data Center:
GCP IN THE ENTERPRISE
So what?In April, Google made a bold statement that they believe that GCP will become the world’s largest
public cloud provider by 2022. As Google’s cloud ecosystem of platforms, tooling and partnerships
continues to grow, it will be coupled with enterprises who are deciding to flee AWS based on
current or future potential competition with Amazon businesses. It’s easy to envision GCP becoming
a welcome new alternative for cloud-native computing for the enterprise in the very near future.
Joe Nedumgottil Cloud-Native Architect
Mike Koleno VP, Technology
@_koleno
@jnedum

12. 12
PROPRIETARY & CONFIDENTIAL
solstice.com
When Less is More:
DEVOPS ON THE
RISE

13. Traditional enterprise IT requires
developers and operations to take
on a plethora of mundane tasks to
deploy and operate software. In
2018, expect enterprises to realize a
more efficient way to operate
through a new DevOps centric
model where the journey of
software travels through automated
pipelines rather than a checklist of
manual tasks. Continuous Delivery is
now within every organization’s
reach!
Further DevOps adoption in 2018
will eliminate the need for the
Superhero (Development) and
Firefighter (Ops) personas within
Enterprise IT. Autonomous cross-
functional teams create the best
models for supporting production
apps. Also noticeably missing from
a DevOps-driven world will be
Zombie-looking Operations teams
who have battled numerous
production battles for days on
end.
13
PROPRIETARY & CONFIDENTIAL
solstice.com
When Less is More:
DEVOPS ON THE RISE
Less Yak
Shaving
Less Superheroes
and Firefighters
As cloud abstraction platforms and
containers rise to rule the earth, there is
less demand for understanding how
individual applications and component
stacks are uniquely supported. Platforms
like Docker, Kubernetes and Cloud
Foundry make managing applications
from different stack lineages a much
more reasonable and achievable task
than ever before.
Less Specialization, even
in a Polyglot world

14. 14
PROPRIETARY & CONFIDENTIAL
solstice.com
So what?
Regardless of where you are in your DevOps journey, enterprise IT outfits should be striving to
reach the same goal in 2018— to build and operate systems at scale through cross-functional
autonomous teams. As organizations become comfortable with these new models,
developers and operations team will shed traditional mundane tasks for those of higher value.
As cloud-native platforms and tooling evolve, organizations will gravitate toward singular
platforms that also abstract away low value, mundane tasks. As DevOps models scale, expect
to see less SMEs and Gatekeepers who seem to play larger than life roles in the traditional IT
world. Surely expect to do more with less than you ever have before!
@_koleno
When Less is More:
DEVOPS ON THE RISE
Mike Koleno VP, Technology

15. 15
PROPRIETARY & CONFIDENTIAL
solstice.com
The New Enterprise Developer:
REACTIVE
PROGRAMMING
& SERVERLESS

16. 16
PROPRIETARY & CONFIDENTIAL
solstice.com
The New Enterprise Developer:
REACTIVE PROGRAMMING & SERVERLESS
Serverless computing brings many
benefits to cloud-native
applications. Because it executes
code only when needed, business
logic is further isolated, which
improves maintainability and
decreases the likelihood of bugs. It
also can bring operational savings
because your serverless function is
only running when needed, so
there is no cost accrued when the
business logic isn't being used.
Reactive programming has been
growing in popularity in recent
years, and it will explode in 2018.
An application that is built
reactively can handle far more
activity with far fewer system
resources. Reactive
programming is a perfect fit for
data-intensive applications.
Go Serverless,
Reap Rewards
Do More With Less,
Go Reactive
Serverless computing will not entirely
replace traditional microservices. Many
use cases remain for the latter. For
example, long-running processes such
as data processing jobs would not be
appropriate for serverless computing.
Enterprises will need to find the sweet
spot where they use serverless and
microservices at the right times.
Find the Sweet Spot
Between Microservices
and Serverless

17. 17
PROPRIETARY & CONFIDENTIAL
solstice.com
The New Enterprise Developer:
REACTIVE PROGRAMMING & SERVERLESS
So what?
Enterprises naturally and rightfully want to minimize risk while also minimizing cost. Serverless
computing and reactive programming are two tools that help achieve those goals. To achieve
them, you must find the sweet spot between when to go serverless, when to use a traditional
microservice, and when to program reactively. Finding that spot will make maintaining your
applications easier and allow you to be more competitive as you are able to deliver greater
value to users.
Steven Calderwood Cloud-Native Architect
@steveninchicago

18. 18
PROPRIETARY & CONFIDENTIAL
solstice.com
Insights from on High:
AI/ML IN THE
CLOUD

19. 19
PROPRIETARY & CONFIDENTIAL
solstice.com
Insights from on High:
AI/ML IN THE CLOUD
More than 50% of companies
expect to implement AI solutions in
2018. There is a big push to provide
AI/ML cloud services from all the
top cloud providers geared to
increase company growth.
Services are also meant to simplify
very complex AI/ML
implementations that can be
utilized by developers, rather than
requiring data scientists for
common patterns.
The proliferation of services that
run on AI will push for increased
cloud storage just to meet the
need for shorter data processing
and analysis. There will continue to
be an increased focus on data
collection across all industries in
order to derive more meaningful
insights and predictions using AI/
ML.
AI/ML going
mainstream
Push For Increased
Cloud Storage
As platform wars continue among big
tech companies like Amazon Web
Services, Google, Microsoft, and IBM, we
can expect continued investment and
innovation in this space in 2018 and
beyond.
Innovation

20. 20
PROPRIETARY & CONFIDENTIAL
solstice.com
So what?
Companies sit on huge amounts of data today that, in many cases, is not being utilized. There is
a strong desire to derive meaningful insights and predictions from this data in order to grow,
save costs, gain new customers, and optimize operations. Every CTO will need to take
advantage of AI/ML capabilities soon. This will lead to increased focus on AI/ML cloud
solutions, as well as increased demand for data storage.
Andy Koziol Cloud-Native Architect
@andrekoziol
Insights from on High:
AI/ML IN THE CLOUD

21. Want to talk cloud?
21
PROPRIETARY & CONFIDENTIAL
solstice.com
Mike Koleno
VP, Technology &
Head of Cloud-Native Practice
mkoleno@solstice.com
815-530-6029