CNCF CTO in-depth interpretation: 2021 cloud native latest development trend

Recently, CNCF released an annual summary of all work in the cloud native field in 2020 [1]. Despite the epidemic situation, we still had a solid year. We hope readers can read the report.

This post will share my thoughts on where cloud native is headed and where it’s headed in 2021 and beyond.

Chris Aniszczyk (CNCF CTO)

Translation: Daixiang (Huawei Cloud native Team)

Cloud native IDE

In the future, the development life cycle (coding, building, debugging) will take place primarily in the cloud, rather than native Emacs or VSCode. Each PR will have a complete development and deployment environment to meet development and debugging needs.

Currently, the GitHub code Space and GitPod are concrete examples of this technology. While the GitHub code space is still in beta, you can try using GitPod. In the case of Prometheus, in about a minute or so you have a complete online development environment, including an editor and preview environment. The crazy thing is that this development environment (workspace) is described in code and can be shared with other developers on the team just like any other code middleware.

I look forward to seeing continued incredible innovation in cloud-native ides in the future, especially as the GitHub code space is widely used at the end of its beta phase so developers can experience the new concept and love it.

Edge Kubernetes

Kubernetes was born in mass data centers, but Like Linux, Kubernetes will evolve to new environments. The end result of Linux is that end users extend the kernel to support new deployment solutions in different domains, including mobile, embedded, and so on.

I firmly believe Kubernetes will go through a similar evolution, and we are already seeing operators (and startups) using Kubernetes as an edge platform, Through KubeEdge, K3S, K0S, LFEdge, Eclipse ioFog and other open source projects, VNF is transformed into Cloud Native Network Function (CNFs). The support for operators and edge scenarios in the super-scale cloud, the ability to reuse cloud-native software, and the ability to build on the current vast cloud-native ecosystem are all driving Kubernetes’ position as the dominant platform for edge computing in the years to come.

Cloud native + WASM

Web assembly (WASM) is a nascent technology, but I expect it to become an increasingly important player in the cloud native ecosystem, especially as WASI matures and Kubernetes becomes more used as the edge collaborator described above. One use case is to power the extension mechanism, as LuaJIT and Envoy do. Instead of working directly with Lua, you can use a small optimized runtime that supports multiple programming languages.

The Envoy project is currently on a journey to adopt WASM, and I expect that any environment will follow a similar pattern, and that scripting languages as popular extension mechanisms will be completely replaced by WASM in the future.

On the Kubernetes side, there are projects like Microsoft’s Krustlet exploring how to support wasi-based runtimes in Kubernetes. This should not be too surprising, as Kubernetes has been extended through CRD and other mechanisms to run different types of workloads, such as VM (KubeVirt), etc. Also, if you are new to WASM, I recommend this introductory course from the Linux Foundation www.edx.org/course/intr…

Rise of FinOps (CFM)

The novel Coronavirus outbreak has accelerated the shift to cloud native, and at least half of companies are accelerating their cloud initiatives in the midst of a crisis… Nearly 60% of respondents said that due to the COVID-19 pandemic (State of the Cloud 2020 Report info.flexera.com/SLO-CM-REPO…

To be honest, I’ve had about half of the discussions I’ve had with companies on my cloud native journey in the last six months. You could also argue that cloud providers are not incentivized to simplify cloud financial management because that would make it easier for customers to reduce expenses. What’s really painful is the lack of open source innovation and standardization in cloud financial management (all clouds manage costs differently), there aren’t many open source projects in CNCF trying to make FinOps easier, and the current KubeCost project is still young.

In addition, the Linux Foundation recently launched the FinOps Foundation to promote innovation in this area, and they have many introductions in this area worth reading (www.edx.org/course/intr…

More cloud native Rust projects

Rust is still a young and niche programming language, especially if you look at Redmonk’s ranking of programming languages. However, my feeling is that in the coming year, you will see Rust in more cloud native projects, as there are already a few CNCF projects that are starting to take advantage of Rust, such as MicroVM Firecracker. While the vast majority of CNCF projects are currently written in Golang, I expect rust-based projects to be on par with GO-based projects within a few years as the Rust community maturates.

GitOps + CD/PD growth significantly

GitOps is an operational model for cloud native technology that provides a set of best practices for unifying application deployment, management, and monitoring (originally proposed by Alexis Richardson of Weaveworks).

The most important aspect of GitOps is to describe the desired system state that is versioned declaratively in Git, which actually enables a complex set of system changes to be properly applied and then verified (through audit logs enabled by Git and other tools).

From a practical standpoint, GitOps enhances the developer experience, and with the growth of Projects like Argo, GitLab, Flux, and more, I expect GitOps tools to have more impact on enterprises this year. If you look at GitLab’s data, GitOps is still an emerging practice that most companies have yet to explore, but as more companies start to adopt cloud-native software on a large scale, GitOps will naturally evolve as I say.

Service Catalog 2.0: Cloud native developer Kanban

The concept of the service directory is not a new thing, for those of us who grew up in the era of ITIL old people, you might remember things of CMDB, but with the development of the rise of the service and cloud native, of service and all kinds of real-time service metadata catalog and index of ability is very important to promote developers automation. This might include using the service catalog to understand the ownership of processing event management, managing SLOS, and so on.

In the future, you’ll see that the developer dashboard is more than just a catalog of services, but can be extended with various automation capabilities. Classic open source examples are Lyft’s Backstage and Clutch, but any company that applies cloud native tends to have a platform infrastructure team trying to build something similar. As open source dashboards with large plug-in ecosystems mature, you will see more and more platform engineering teams accelerate their use.

Crossing the clouds is no longer a dream

Kubernetes and the Cloud Native movement have demonstrated that cloud native and multi-cloud approaches are possible in production environments. Data shows that 93% of enterprises use multiple cloud vendors such as Microsoft, Amazon and Google (State of the Cloud 2020 report info.flexera.com/SLO-CM-REPO…

As the cloud market matures, Kubernetes is expected to open programmatic cross-cloud management services. A concrete example is in the Crossplane project, which utilizes the extensibility of the Kubernetes API to provide an open source cross-cloud control plane for cross-cloud workload management (see thenewstack. IO /gitlab-depl…

EBPF goes mainstream

You can think of eBPF as a sandbox extension mechanism that allows you to run programs in the Linux kernel without changing kernel code or loading modules. EBPF allows a new generation of software to extend the behavior of the Linux kernel to support a variety of different features, including improved networking, monitoring, and security. The downside of eBPF is that it requires a higher kernel version to take advantage of it, and for a long time this was not a realistic option for many companies.

However, things are changing, and even newer versions of RHEL are starting to support eBPF, and you’ll see more projects using it. If you look at Sysdig’s latest container report (sysdig.com/blog/sysdig…