The future of cloud infrastructure is trending towards streamlined internal platforms. Liam Randall, CEO of Cosmonic, believes developers are moving towards a mindset where they no longer need to worry about application capabilities and dependencies, similar to how they no longer think about individual servers, data centers, or operating systems. He explains that just as developers rely on public clouds to maintain their data centers, they also want their platforms to manage their application dependencies.
WebAssembly is expected to bring about the next phase of software abstraction, moving beyond containerization. According to Randall, componentized applications based on the WebAssembly Component Model offer compatibility with container ecosystem concepts like service mesh, Kubernetes, and containers themselves. These components solve the cold start problem, are smaller and more secure than containers, and can be composed across language and framework boundaries.
Bringing Virtualization to Kubernetes Clusters
Another emerging trend is inner-Kubernetes virtualization. Lukas Gentele, CEO and co-founder of Loft Labs, explains that the concept of hardware virtualization for Linux servers is now being applied to Kubernetes clusters. This shift aims to address the rising costs of cloud computing, especially with AI and machine learning workloads, where sharing and dynamic allocation of computing resources are crucial.
