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2023 Autonomous Cloud Management Predictions

By
Suresh Mathew

Suresh Mathew

Published on
Last updated on

August 2, 2023

Max 3 min
2023 Autonomous Cloud Management Predictions

The end of the year typically brings with it a wide set of predictions for the year ahead. These forecasts can help frame your thinking about what could happen in the coming year, and what that could mean for you. With that thought in mind, I’d like to share eight predictions for 2023 and explain what they could mean for the adoption of autonomous cloud management in your company. After reviewing these predictions, I encourage you to review the current level of autonomous system usage in your public cloud technology stack, and how Sedai can help further improve that usage level and impact in 2023. 

1. Autonomous Cloud Management Will Grow Rapidly In 2023

Macroeconomists are pessimistic about gross domestic product growth in Europe and the United States in 2023 (for example the Conference Board forecasts 2023 US growth to be zero percent, although 2024 growth will rebound to 1.7%) [1]. But even in weak macroeconomic scenarios, adoption of modern applications and the technologies around them are likely to remain stellar. In a recent report, Gartner® predicts, "By 2026, organizations performing real-time cost or performance optimization of cloud-based workloads will rise from less than 20% in 2022 to 50%.  We’re looking forward to seeing real-time autonomous optimization becoming the norm among organizations.

2. Organizations will become comfortable with the concept of autonomous management

Autonomous management is moving towards its crossing the chasm moment beyond usage just inside hyperscale organizations into the enterprise and innovative startups.  Part of this adoption phase is the growing comfort with the use of autonomous, which is a shift for organizations who have had no choice but to operate with manual optimization and remediation due to a dearth of viable solutions.  In the same Gartner Predictions report, Gartner recommends “Build trust by enabling autonomous optimization in existing tools today if you are using any of them in an “advisory only” mode.”[2]  As companies hear more success stories of the usage of autonomous management we expect they will start trials and proof of concept evaluations to validate the impact for their organization.

3. Cloud Cost Savings will be the driver for autonomous adoption in the modern apps container ecosystem

Macroeconomists are fairly pessimistic about gross domestic product growth in the United States and Europe next year, and the continued threat of recession will mean the focus on cloud cost and cost efficiency in general that has been seen this year especially in the tech vertical will continue.  With autonomous systems showing 50% or more cloud cost gains for containerized workloads with minimal human effort needed to operate the systems, we expect cost to be the most common driver for adoption in 2023.  After organizations discover the cost gains, they will also embrace autonomous for its ability to drive performance, availability and release velocity gains.   

4. Performance & Availability Use Cases will breakout in eCommerce and SaaS 

We expect autonomous management with a performance and uptime focus will be a key use case in 2023 within verticals where customer experiences are highly sensitive to website page load latency & the response times of the related back end services.  An ecommerce provider ahead of the curve is fabric.  Fabric’s headless commerce technology powers the ecommerce front-ends of major brands such as McDonalds, RH and GNC.  fabric adopted autonomous management was above to drive down latency by 48%, with even high results achieved on key customer-facing services for adding products to carts and the checkout process [3].  Overall, Sedai expects to see a mix of cost and performance use cases in 2023.  Sedai was mentioned in the Gartner report as an example of a more recent generation of workload optimization tool that supports a smaller set of cloud-native platforms.

 

5. Organizations will increase the share of workloads running on serverless and serverless containers 

As modern apps continue to grow, we expect Kubernetes to remain the overall dominant architecture for modern apps through 2023 but anticipate that during the year that serverless architectures will gain share as organizations embrace the fast time to value and low ops burden of these platforms, and as cloud providers and operations tools providers deliver enhancements.  Regardless of architecture, autonomous cloud systems will ease the operational burden of running serverless or container based architectures.  

6. Autonomous systems will blur the boundary of ideal use cases for serverless.

We expect public cloud providers to emphasize the capabilities of serverless next year, just as AWS CTO Werner Vogels did at re:Invent in 2022 [4].  With the adoption of autonomous systems (and especially capabilities like autonomous concurrency), Lambda will now be recognized as ideal for real time, latency sensitive use cases.  And not just for batch processing, event-driven systems, or systems with variable workloads.   Architects and developers will have the freedom to finally have multiple platforms to choose from for the same use case, whether building an API or a website at scale. Should I go with Kubernetes or Lambda or ECS?  They all will be almost identical in terms of cost, performance, reliability and operational overhead when autonomous systems are deployed to optimize them in real-time.  

7. Modern Apps Users will Recognize Autonomous Management Is Essential for Efficiency

Modern apps using microservices need autonomous management to be efficient. That’s why Kubernetes, ECS and Serverless can see more than 50% wastage relative to optimal cost and performance. It’s impossible to run these efficiently with teams and automated systems. Autonomous systems are needed.  We expect the wider modern apps community to acknowledge this in 2023, as the impossibility of being able to adjust all the knobs and dials (memory, CPU settings etc) in real-time and at every release without an autonomous system becomes clearer.   This will also give a boost to technologies like Fargate which help reduce operational burden.

8. Knowledge of Autonomous Systems Will Become an Expected Part of SRE, DevOps & Platform Engineering Toolkits

As recently as 2021, 88% of SREs, including engineers for some of the world’s largest, most innovative digital companies, reported they did not use any form of AIOps as a day-to-day part of their monitoring toolkit [5].  We expect this situation to have changed significantly by the end of 2023.  As organizations embrace the autonomous approach they will increasingly value and come to expect professionals who have an understanding and experience with using autonomous cloud tools to optimize cloud environments.

Learn more

I hope you found these 2023 predictions thought-provoking. I would encourage you to continue to think about what the ongoing macroeconomic clouds mean specifically for your organization and translate that into an action plan that leverages autonomous cloud systems in 2023 to improve your cost, performance, availability and release velocity. In the meantime, I wish you all a safe and happy holiday season and wish you ongoing success in the new year.

Sources:

[1] “The Conference Board Economic Forecast for the US Economy”, December 14, 2022, The Conference Board

[2]  “Predicts 2023: Observing and Optimizing the Adaptive Organization”, Published 17 November 2022, Gartner Inc, Authored By Gregg Siegfried, Jim Scheibmeir, Mrudula Bangera, Bjarne Munch, Matt Crossley

[3] “Achieving Performance Gains in Latency Sensitive Industries”, Prakash Muppirala, fabric Inc., August 3 2022, presentation at autocon/22 conference.

[4] “Keynote with Dr. Werner Vogels”, AWS re:Invent 2022 -, December 1, 2022.

[5] “SREs Say AIOps Doesn’t Live Up to the Hype”, Leo Vasilou, June 24, 2021, DevOps.com  

GARTNER is the registered trademark and service mark of Gartner Inc., and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and/or internationally and has been used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose."

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