Each year we see subsequent breakthroughs in innovation and technology. In the spirit of 2023, we sat down with Justin Paul of Justin’s IT blog and Senior Product Manager at Zerto, an HPE company. We picked his brain about the current state of the Kubernetes industry, where he thinks it will go in 2023, and how organizations can use this advanced technology to protect their valuable assets no matter where they are stored.
In which industry or for which use did Kubernetes grow the most in 2022? Did this surprise you, and why?
During 2022, Zerto saw growth from customers in all sectors with regard to Kubernetes data protection. It is becoming rare to speak with a customer who doesn’t have some plan for Kubernetes and cloud-native applications, which isn’t a surprise because customers are recognizing Kubernetes as a production-grade method for deploying production applications.
Do you think this pattern is indicative of expansions we will see next year? If so, why?
As more and more customers move from the planning to execution stages of their cloud-native application journey, we will see more workloads that need data protection. Just like virtual machines before, containers are becoming the preferred choice of developers.
How will the technology of K8s grow in 2023?
As more use cases are thrown at Kubernetes, the platform will have to evolve. New methods will be introduced to solve business challenges as production workloads are shifted from VMs to containers, and this will drive a lot of innovation over the next couple of years. K8s is still maturing. This means there are some battle-tested best practices in the traditional VM world, especially around security and disaster recovery, that still need to be more widely adopted by DevOps teams.
How will the use of K8s help more organizations in 2023?
It’s all about being nimble. As business needs and demands change, IT and application developers have to respond quicker than ever to meet the needs of their consumers. Leveraging Kubernetes, containers, and all things “as-code”—including data protection as code—helps to speed up the development and adoption of products and services. Faster to market equals faster revenue.
What would be something you’d like to see happen in the next year?
Kubernetes is amazing for application developers, but the infrastructure below it can be confusing for beginners on the infrastructure side of things. There are a lot of virtual machine infrastructure admins who will get their feet wet with Kubernetes in 2023. Because of that, I would love to see the Kubernetes ecosystem start to embrace the “non-developer” persona more; this will make it easier for infrastructure teams to adopt a “K8s first” methodology.
How can data-driven organizations best prepare themselves for 2023?
As Kubernetes evolves and becomes the go-to platform for application development and deployment, attackers will focus more efforts on exploiting the data that is there. The number one thing a data-driven organization needs to do in 2023 is to make sure that data is protected and recoverable using proven, scalable, enterprise-class solutions that are purpose-built for K8s.
