2022 brought many unforeseen challenges in the tech industry, forcing enterprises to navigate the economic downturn by rethinking their budgets and spending more efficiently. Businesses will proceed with caution this year – many have already slowed or halted hiring or even reduced staff. One thing is certain: businesses will need to consolidate their tech stacks. This can include reevaluating vendors, merging cloud-based offerings, or even investing in new technology that provides a better bang for the buck. Heading into 2023, technology that provides flexibility, transparency, and the ability to do more with less will prevail. I predict that technologies such as serverless, multi-model databases, cloud, and edge computing will continue to increase in popularity as teams realize the role of consolidation in saving on spend.
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Multi-model databases will streamline the tech stack, enabling developers and operational teams to do more with less
Given the need to manage massive amounts of data in an uncertain macro environment, organizations will continue to move away from relational databases towards multi-model databases, which can handle different data types and models, including documents, graphs, and relational and key-value databases – all from a single, integrated backend. Multi-model databases provide unified data management, access, and governance. This speeds up time to market, accelerates developer productivity while eliminating the need to context switch between varying data stores, and lowers deployment and operational costs – saving resources at a time when budgets are tight. Developers and enterprises are in sync – developers want to consolidate the tools they work with while still being able to address the breadth of their needs, and enterprises need to support developer productivity. We’ll see significant growth in next-generation databases that can seamlessly support both transactions and analytics for real-time business insights, eliminating the need for a separate vendor solution for operational analytics.
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Serverless architectures will continue to gain momentum
Serverless architecture will continue to see strong adoption across the stack. The emergence of serverless technologies has transformed the way applications and software are built—from application architectures to the DevOps toolchain to the economics of software development. The serverless compute offerings across various cloud providers have seen accelerating adoption. This trend will continue across the application stack with the availability of serverless data tiers from all major data vendors. Serverless edge computing platforms leveraging 5G/6G’s millisecond latencies and AI optimizations will facilitate a Cloud Continuum across multi-cloud and edge locations.
The rise of distributed clouds and the cloud-edge continuum
A distributed cloud is an architecture where multiple clouds are used to meet compliance needs, performance requirements, or support edge computing while being centrally managed by the public cloud provider. Edge computing technologies that enable real-time analysis of information closer to the point of data generation will be adopted by the mainstream. Multi-cloud and edge locations will give rise to increased adoption of distributed cloud for best-of-breed services, resiliency, and eliminating vendor lock-in. The distributed cloud will have cloud services deployed at different physical locations, across clouds, to the edge, and on customer premises.
Enabling this flexibility by deploying cloud services physically closer to the point of computation unlocks several real-time and low-tenancy use cases while addressing data sovereignty, data gravity, and regulatory requirements where the location of the underlying infrastructure is determined by the point of need. The distributed cloud model forms the underpinning of a composable infrastructure approach we have started seeing customers adopt this year and will continue to gain momentum.
Developers will drive the adoption of the modern cloud stack with emerging technologies, including edge computing, distributed infrastructure, 5G connectivity, and WebAssembly
Emerging technologies like WebAssembly (WASM) will start to gain more mindshare and adoption as developers start using these as significant accelerators of the edge story. WASM’s portability, security, and low resource overhead, along with the lack of a cold start problem, make it ideal for the edge. We are starting to enable database processing to be done within a browser that can be done at the edge. This brings compute closer to the data and eliminates costly network transfer costs of replicating data to the cloud while processing and providing actionable insights in real-time close to the data source.
The trend and adoption of the distributed cloud with technologies that enable this with WASM and 5G/6G will accelerate the emergence of a distributed database that can reside and process data in real time at the edge while synchronizing data back across multiple cloud regions and providers.
With over 16 years of experience, Rahul Pradhan is VP of Products at Couchbase, a cloud database platform company that 30% of the Fortune 100 depend on.