Tech Trends in 2022 – Your Customary January Predictions Blog

January is always a month for tech predictions. I cooked up a few of my own, in the main areas SUSE’s technology and solutions intersects with. So here’s my little list.

1. Key Tech Area #1 – Cloud

Continued growth

Fully expect to see continued hyper growth in 2022, hybrid and multi cloud seems to be the dominant strategies for most enterprises. Whether or not the pandemic ends this year (fingers crossed, please God let’s make it so!), the shift to cloud will continue to accelerate. Apparently Gartner predicts global spending on cloud services will reach $482+ billion in 2022, up from $314 billion in 2020. I think we can all agree, most companies are moving to an OpEx model and have recognized the value of cloud-optimized and microservice-based solutions for the years ahead.

Hyperscalers take the lead in Hybrid Cloud

For the past 5 years or so, hybrid cloud was traditional hardware vendors’ answer to the Cloud migration question raised by customers. But the equation has been shifting in the last year or so, as public cloud providers like AWS launch offerings like Outposts – bridging the gap for many customers who can’t move to the public cloud for one reason or another. This will grow and accelerate in 2022. AWS for example, has launched offerings like Outposts and EKS Anywhere for companies with compliance and security requirements that require continued on-premise capabilities. Of course SUSE’s own Rancher is perfectly positioned for this new hybrid world – as the world’s most widely deployed multi-cluster Kubernetes orchestration solution.

Vertical Clouds March onto Center Stage

Industry specific clouds are going to mature in a big way in 2022. The major cloud providers, software vendors and SIs large and small are developing a lot of solutions – targeted at specific industry verticals. The goal is simplifying common business processes, accelerating time to market and providing a new means of digital differentiation.

Cloud and Edge Gets Ever Closer

The tech worlds of Cloud and Edge are colliding. There is a lot of experimentation pairing edge computing with hybrid cloud scenarios, opening the door for distributed cloud services that run at the edge. A fun little use case I ran across was iRobot, who leverages AWS IoT to control its “army” of robot minions – um, I mean – your wonderful little sweeper helpers.

Speaking of Edge, this brings us to the next big area.

2. Key Tech Area #2 – Edge

Edge Use Cases Push the Cloud to Any Locale Near You

New, purpose-built apps and devices will become adopted widely in 2022 and bring digital transformation to pretty much anything you can imagine: warehouses, check; restaurants, check; retail stores, but of course; hospitals, schools… do you even need to ask? Even farms – agriculture will never be the same after this new wave of IoT lovefest.

The Edge Gets Fatter

Which one of one hasn’t put on a few Covid pounds in the last 2 years. Something kinda similar is happening to edge workloads in the same time frame. Joking aside, what I’m referring to is more and more compute and storage is happening on the edge. In many industries and use cases, a multitude of sensors generate a flood of data, and a lot of the processing happens right on site to generate real time business insights.

The Edge Gets Smarter

This one is fun and exciting, but also a mouthful – distributed federated learning with the support of central clouds is becoming a reality in 2022. We are basically talking about AI at the Edge. For example, hospital could all benefit by sharing a lot of patent healthcare data to train algorithms that provide diagnostics help. However, HIPPA will not allow for this kind of sharing scenario. With federated learning, multiple hospitals can just train the algorithm using in house data, but the resulting algorithm gets smarter due to the cross training, without violating any privacy and data sharing laws – and leading to much better patient outcomes.

3. Key Tech Area #3 – Cloud Native/Containers/ Kubernetes

Kubernetes Moves to Production

The tone of conversation around the topic of containers and Kubernetes will change in a big way in 2022. It’s no longer just “looks interesting” or “how do I deploy it?” The new conversation is about scale and going live. Kubernetes will become more and more mainstream and more and more customers start architecting their cloud with K8S at the heart.

Another Sign of Maturity – Service Mesh

In 2022, let’s just throw it onto Kubernetes is no longer going to be a satisfactory answer for your business stakeholders. Service Meshes will be adopted in a big way – allowing for holistic consideration around security, observability, reliability.

That’s it for now. So what do you think? I would love to hear your comments and your own predictions!