Containerisation, Hypervisors, and Backup: Data Management and Application Delivery Trends for 2023

The one thing that remains constant is change. And our technology-dependent business world demands it. Each year, we see older technologies fade while new solutions and approaches emerge. As the new year gets under way, we will see a number of trends in the application delivery and data management space. Here are our predictions for the coming year and beyond.

1. Containerisation will accelerate

Over the last few years, microservices has been a hot topic. The deployment and management model makes economical sense in theory. Yet, in practice, it is quite different. The gating factors are limited software interoperability, platform complexity, and a scarcity of required skill sets. Highly specialised and expensive resources are required to build, deliver, and maintain microservice platforms today, while undue expenses are incurred by legacy platform management tasks. This means that it has not been possible for hardware and software platforms to efficiently deploy container-based applications. Throughout 2023, with new solutions on the horizon, we expect this to change, and we will see containerisation and microservices environments accelerate. 

2. Turnkey encapsulated stacks will simplify application deployment

Containerisation enables entire application stacks to be deployed across multiple platforms automatically, without human intervention. With current methodologies, application deployment can take weeks to install each component before testing that the system is correctly deployed. We will see greater adoption of turnkey encapsulated stacks throughout the coming year, which will enable IT teams to deploy applications from a single source, and decrease deployment and ongoing management expenses.

3. Hypervisor-based deployments will begin to decline

Virtual Machine methodologies were introduced more than 20 years ago, while its adoption curve hit approximately a decade ago. The cycle of history suggests what will happen next. Over the next few years, we will see containerised workloads emerge, as discussed above, as well as a reduction of the VM layer significantly decreasing processing costs. In turn, the role of the hypervisor layer in the deployment and management of enterprise applications will become less and less important.

4. Legacy backup and recovery methodologies will fall out of use

Legacy technologies such as Business Continuity (BC) and Disaster Recovery (DR) are all too frequently an overlooked and underperforming cost to enterprise IT teams, and little to no progress has been made in the operations and technologies implemented in this area of the technology stack. Throughout 2023, we expect organisations will move to a production-based protection and recovery approach. BC, DR and other similar technologies are not only expensive, but also inefficient, process intensive, and can even fail on recovery. As a result of the emergence of AI-managed datasets, and low-cost and high-volume NVME-based media, along with the ability to replicate small subsets of metadata to multiple locations, these newer solutions will begin to overtake disk and tape-based backup and recovery approaches.