In this article, we talk about the top cloud trends for the year 2023. As these domains continue to evolve over the years, these trends will see an increased level of adoption, better open-source offerings, and more comprehensive solutions.
Our team at Argonaut shipped a whole bunch of features in 2022. These are meant to keep our customers up to date with industry best practices and have a significant overlap with the trends you will see here. Many come as a natural evolution of our product, while some new features are made to help you bring alignment with your existing workflows outside of Argonaut. We have an article summarizing the top features we launched in 2022 and our focus domains.
Multi-cloud
Multi-cloud is increasing in popularity - Companies choosing to deploy on the cloud now leverage offerings from multiple vendors. This shift means cloud tools have to be more integrated with tools from all major platforms. It also means a difference in pricing, user experience, or offer between the major providers. From a user standpoint, the benefits are that it helps them avoid vendor lock-in. An example setup of this is a global e-commerce store using AWS in NA regions and Alibaba cloud in the APAC region to better cater to their customers.
Low-code and no-code cloud services
Today, several low-code and no-code solutions are available for most tasks on the cloud. These will only gain popularity, and newer solutions will come up, making it easier for new startups to join the cloud bandwagon. Most such services come as a subscription service, have ready-made templates, and offer free tiers making it easy for new users to get started.
These tools are becoming more powerful as they use AI and ML models to understand the user's needs and provide a more customized solution. Tools like Airtable, Figma, AppSheet, and Bubble have reduced the complexity of designing, coding, and maintaining apps and websites.
AI/ML-powered cloud
Users can run AI and ML workloads through specialized cloud services. Additionally, cloud providers are leveraging AI and ML to improve their services by managing their resources more efficiently, enhancing security, threat detection, and more.
Both GCP and AWS have a lot of AI and ML services on offer, along with a great many learning resources. They also have specialized hardware and optimized frameworks that allow users to run these workloads on the cloud.
Cloud security & resilience
Several security risks exist while operating in the cloud. Companies will turn to “security-as-a-service” providers and AI and predictive technology to detect threats before they cause issues. There will be an increase in investment in cloud security & resilience, along with increased hiring by companies to make their cloud systems more resilient. The State of DevOps report shows how to integrate security practices in your software development process and reduce your organization's risks.
Cloud sustainability and serverless computing
AWS Lambda SnapStart shows how the cold start problem with serverless computing can be overcome. The state of serverless report shows an increase in serverless adoption among organizations using all major cloud providers.
Google Cloud has the goal to run fully on carbon-free energy by 2030. With new products like the Carbon Sense suite and improving the efficiency of the underlying hardware, these companies are making a big push toward Cloud sustainability. The impact of this is amplified in a big way as companies all over the world start leveraging sustainable cloud offerings.
There is also potential for several more cloud-based sustainability monitoring tools.
FinOps
Many companies shifted to the cloud during the pandemic, and 2023 will be the year they look to make their cloud spending tighter. Additionally, the upcoming recession means more companies will be keen on optimizing their cloud budgets and saving where possible.
FinOps is an interdisciplinary line bringing together finance, engineering, product, and management. FinOps.org research data shows it is practiced across industries and geographies. It is also noted that companies, on average, use 3.7 tools for FinOps, including cloud provider tools and homegrown solutions.
GitOps
Organizations practicing GitOps have been able to manage application deployments and infrastructure updates in a more reliable, automated, and secure manner. It simplifies the DevOps cycle from development to production and also makes collaboration between teams easier.
GitOps is seen as a natural evolution of Kubernetes because you can now declaratively manage infrastructure and maintain a single source of truth. While organizations can implement GitOps workflows with their existing Git tools, some also choose these popular tools for Kubernetes, like ArgoCD and Flux.
In 2023, these trends will continue, and more organizations running Kubernetes will switch to GitOps practices to be more efficient, have more automated testing, and collaborate better.
Argonaut in 2023
In 2023, we plan to take our product further by giving you more control over your workflow. Sneak peek at our upcoming features:
Powerful workflows via GitOps using ArgoCD and terraform under the hood
Fine-grained RBAC for views and actions
Bringing support for more third-party apps and infra resources
A more comprehensive secret management solution
Improved cost visibility
Built-in observability
GPU and ML Ops support, and so much more
Stay tuned!