In 2013, the year before I founded Intellyx, I fearlessly created ZapThink’s Vision for Enterprise IT in 2020 in poster form. (My previous firm, ZapThink, was a boutique analyst firm focused on Service-Oriented Architecture, or SOA. It was acquired by Dovel Technologies in 2011, and I continued to run it until the end of 2013.)
It only makes sense that for our first Cortex newsletter of 2020 that I look back on this effort from seven years prior to see how well I did in predicting the current state of affairs. Rather than a dull list of hits and misses, however, I’ll ask a singular question: how well did I presage cloud-native computing?
Whither SOA?
Given ZapThink’s dozen years riding the SOA wave, it only makes sense that I put SOA in the center as a core enabling approach along with cloud and mobile computing. (Click on the image for a larger version of the poster, or click here for the 10 MB pdf). Today we hear little about SOA, although its core tenets provided an important foundation for both microservices architecture and the cloud-native architecture that succeeded it in turn.
I accurately predicted elements of this trend as ‘Lightweight Intermediation,’ aka SOA without middleware, which represents the ‘smart endpoints, dumb pipes’ nature of microservices architecture (traditional SOA, of course, had these reversed). ‘Next-Gen Modularization’ also presaged microservices, although I was thinking more of coarse-grained components than the typically fine-grained units of execution that microservices turned out to be.
Lightweight Intermediation, in fact, supported one of my five ‘supertrends’ that appear around the perimeter of the poster: ‘Deep Interoperability.’ This notion requires that disparate pieces of technology work together dynamically, which is core to the value of today’s service mesh technologies, as well as the ‘Next-Gen API Management’ that has now become a reality as well.
One place I missed the boat, however: ‘Hypermedia-Oriented Architecture’ (HOA). Core to the original vision of REST was the ability to leverage hypermedia to maintain application state in otherwise stateless environments – a principle that proved too difficult to implement in practice. Instead, cloud-native computing leverages configuration-driven abstractions to manage state for stateless microservices.
What about Hybrid IT?
‘Hybrid IT’ doesn’t explicitly appear on the poster, but its core architectural characteristic is the ‘Location Independence’ supertrend.
On the poster, I define this supertrend as ‘the physical location of technology is hidden from view and irrelevant to the user.’ This location independence is broader than IT infrastructure to be sure, but it’s central to hybrid IT nevertheless.
Hybrid IT is not just a heterogeneous combination of on-premises and cloud-based resources. We’ve had heterogeneous technology for decades, and it was always a burden – but not so with hybrid IT.
Hybrid IT requires a comprehensive abstraction that gives users of the technology a consistent way of working with it, regardless of whether a particular application or infrastructure component is on-premises or in one cloud or another. In other words, hybrid IT is location independence in action.
Furthermore, cloud-native infrastructure goes beyond hybrid IT as it also includes edge computing – which extends the notion of location independence to every sensor and mobile device.
Precursors to the Cloud-Native Management Story
There are two boxes in the poster that tie directly to cloud-native management. The first is ‘Advanced Visualization,’ which represents a combination of IT ops visualization and big data – now de rigueur for cloud-native management.
Visualization, however, isn’t the whole story. There’s also the ‘Self-Correcting Systems’ oval, consisting of continuous, automated quality assurance – today, a core characteristic of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).
I did miss one piece of the cloud-native management puzzle, however, with the ‘Fully Automated Data Center’ oval. Such lights-out ops is at best still well into the future. Instead, cloud-native observability includes advanced visualization combined with automation-empowered control.
Will Cloud-Native get Cybersecurity Right?
Today’s cloud-native cybersecurity centers on a combination of zero-trust plus identity-based endpoint abstractions – but there’s no arguing with the fact that even the best of today’s cybersecurity (cloud-native or not) isn’t up to the task of adequately lowering cybersecurity risk.
I predicted this sad state of affairs in two places on the poster. The ‘Cyberpunk Nightmare’ crisis point warned that (black hat) hackers had the advantage, and would continue to have the edge over enterprises for years to come. Today, there are no indications that this nightmare is improving.
I also called out the ‘Ongoing Cyberwar.’ Of all the predictions on the poster, this one is the most accurate – and the most chilling. In 2013, who knew that nation-state bad actors and organized criminals would sway elections via malicious cyberattacks?
We’ve been losing this war since before I published this poster, and in this US election year, all indications are that we are still losing.
Will Enterprise Architecture Ever Recover?
Given that cloud-native computing depends upon architecture, and such architecture should extend beyond IT infrastructure to all parts of the business, you’d think that the enterprise architecture (EA) function would be driving the cloud-native train.
Unfortunately, my call for ‘Next-Generation Enterprise Architecture’ that reinvents EA as continuous transformation best practice has largely been unrealized.
True, the ‘Fall of Frameworks’ I predicted has largely come to pass. The traditional practice of EA has become less relevant in many enterprises committed to the increasing agility that cloud-native computing promises. Unfortunately, nothing has risen to take its place.
On the plus side, I predicted significant advancements in how enterprise IT would handle governance – albeit without much help from the enterprise architects. ‘Next Generation Governance’ called for governance replacing integration as the key to enterprise IT – a central theme in the configuration-driven context for cloud-native computing, as well as being core to service mesh behavior.
Fundamentally, I predicted that governance would be more about enablement than roadblocks – and this theme appears with the ‘Next-Gen BPM’ box, where agility trumps efficiency when technology enables agile processes instead of constraining them – including governance processes.
Given today’s increasingly strict regulatory context for IT in the era of GDPR and numerous other regulations, supporting agility while simultaneously requiring regulatory compliance raises the bar for governance overall – and is necessarily central to cloud-native computing.
The Intellyx Take
How well the 2013 me predicted how enterprise IT would look in 2020 is really beside the point. After all, no one really cares. Instead, taking a look at the still nascent world of cloud-native computing through seven-year-old glasses provides a contrasting perspective on the trend that highlights how far we’ve come.
True, cloud-native computing is still new. It covers vast swaths of IT best practices, and its very definition is still in flux. How enterprise IT will look seven years hence is anybody’s guess. After all, a lot can change in that amount of time.
Ongoing change, however, is central to the poster – literally. The ‘Continuous Business Transformation’ at the center of the poster is directly on point. While such transformation was merely a gleam in SOA’s eye at the time, it became a core principle of digital transformation, and today, is essential to the cloud-native computing vision as well.
For the final lesson of the poster, take a look at what hasn’t changed (or changed all that much) – cloud computing. Mobile computing. Agile and DevOps. The Internet of Things. All of these trends were already well under way in 2013, and arguably some of them are still ramping up in 2020. Will any of them – or anything else we’re calling cloud-native today – survive until 2027? Let history be the judge.
Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. Image credit: Dovel Technologies.
