Regardless of their final shape, streamlined internal platforms appear to be an inevitable trajectory for cloud infrastructure. “As modern builders increasingly disregard individual servers, data centers, and operating systems, we’re poised to enter an era where they won’t need to concern themselves with application capabilities and dependencies,” asserts Liam Randall, CEO of Cosmonic. As developers rely heavily on modern cloud infrastructure to support their data centers, contractors similarly require robust utility dependencies from their platforms to ensure uninterrupted operations.
As Randall’s vision unfolds, the next phase of software abstraction is poised to revolutionize the industry, paving the way for a new era beyond containerization. Randall notes that componentized functions, drawing from the WebAssembly Component Model, align well with container-centric concepts such as service meshes, Kubernetes, and containers themselves, yet remain independent of these frameworks. Elements rectify the cold-start issue by being smaller than containers, safer, and composably applicable across language and framework boundaries, he explains.
Bringing virtualization to Kubernetes clusters
Inner-Kubernetes virtualization is an additional emerging area. “With the same paradigm driving hardware virtualization for Linux servers, Kubernetes is now leveraging this approach,” declares Lukas Gentele, CEO and co-founder of Loft Labs. One pressing challenge is effectively managing cloud computing costs, particularly in conjunction with the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and diverse workloads. As computing resources are increasingly shared and dynamically allocated, the ability to do so efficiently has become more crucial than ever.
