The New Stack Survey: What to Expect in 2019
#173: The New Stack Survey: What to Expect in 2019
We learned a lot about our readers upon completion of our reader’s survey at the end of last year. According to those who responded to the SurveyMonkey questionnaire, working mostly in development and/or DevOps or operations, the trends and topics you are especially interested in include artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) on Kubernetes or serverless in cloud native environments. DevOps, as well as security, of course also play a big role as data is processed, managed and stored in new and exciting ways.
It was with these topics in mind that Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief, of The New Stack, along with Joab Jackson, TNS managing editor, hosted the last TNS podcast of 2018. The guests were Dillon Erb, CEO of Paperspace, which offers solutions for ML and AI deployments on the cloud, and Chenxi Wang, managing director of venture capital firm Rain Capital, with an emphasis on next-generation security solutions.
In the security space as organizations increasingly adopt cloud-native environments, a lot of the data layers on the backend still stay within traditional infrastructures, Wang said.
“So, we’ve seen companies where the front-end and even the middle layer are very much containerized and orchestrated but are tied to Oracle databases,” Want said. “And you look at that and say, ‘huh’ — the data layer then becomes the bottleneck, which is what these companies are experiencing today.”
Organizations are consequently moving most of the cloud-native infrastructure towards the backend where the layers are, Wang said. The database and storage layers must thus also be more aligned with cloud-native architectures, Wang said. “Now, when that happens, the question is so what about security? So, today, there are certain, for instance, database gateways, which are not yet containerized and orchestrated so that the layer has to happen as well,” Wang said. “So, we don’t quite know from the security standpoint where the next step is going to be regarding the data layer. “But we know that is going to require re-engineering of today’s data security and controls to make that happen — which is to me, opportunities for innovation.”
Indeed, Erb said the data layer largely represents the main bottleneck in a lot of larger migrations. “I see it kind of in two dimensions: I mean, the first is purely technical. I think, running containerized databases in a distributed PAN cloud environment is technically complex,” Erb said. “The other side that I’m seeing is really kind of the tooling that larger organizations are requesting or building around data governance, data sovereignty and figuring out who owns what and who can access what,” Erb said. “[The result] is the emergence of kind of the chief compliance officer or the CIO who is kind of caring a lot more about, ‘hey, we’ve collected a lot of data and actually, we might have a new AI or machine learning team that can do miraculous things with this data.’ And that really puts a lot of pressure on the data layer, in understanding how it operates.”
This emerging dynamic in data management ‘is definitely one of the more interesting areas in 2019 that I think we’ll see,” Erb said. There are “new companies working on it, new technologies and a lot of pressure to articulate what that looks like,” Erb said.
As the data layer moves to more cloud-native architectures, it is also “the right time to be thinking about how we architect those controls as opposed to just taking the legacy security control and trying to retrofit,” Wang said.
“We need brand new data classification tagging mechanisms to meet some of the modern data security and sovereign’s requirements,” Wang said. “And I think this cloud-native migration offers an opportunity to really rethink how we architect, how we design and how we implement those controls.”
In this Edition:
3:01: Wang’s take on the security angle
9:16: What are some of the topics on your mind looking ahead to 2019?
14:23: Does this mean organizations should start ramping up on training for cloud-native and open source technologies?
21:39: For 2019 I think we might see less of AI technologies given recent privacy concerns and GDPR. Is this low hanging fruit for you, or a distraction?
31:41: What about the developer experience then?
36:29: Thoughts on the growing influence of enterprise software companies
Feature image via Pixabay.
