As part of my role as a senior product marketing manager at an enterprise software company with an open source development model, I publish a regular update about open source community, market, and industry trends for product marketers, managers, and other influencers. Here are five of my and their favorite articles from that update.
An idiot's guide to Kubernetes
Kubernetes has already grown to encompass new features which have made it a better container platform for enterprise software. Elements like security and advanced networking have been pulled into the main body of the upstream Kubernetes code, and are now available for everyone to use.
It is, however, true that there will always be supplementary needs to cover other aspects of an enterprise solution; things like logging and performance monitoring. This is where secondary packages like Istio come into play, bringing extra functionality, but keeping the Kubernetes core to a reasonable size and set of features.
The impact: I've always found that it is easy to take awareness of technology developments for granted. When everyone you interact with is also on the "cutting edge" your perspective gets skewed to the point where you might even think that someone who doesn't know about the latest in (INSERT PREFERRED TECHNOLOGY HERE) just isn't keeping up, when really it just hasn't started to impact their ability to do what they need to. Those people aren't idiots; they're our friends, customers, partners, collaborators, and communities.
Gartner: What to consider before adopting low-code development
Despite the focus on business IT teams, Gartner finds an increasingly important developer community is the central IT professional developers needing rapid development of simple applications, or to build minimum viable products or multi-experience capabilities. And when application leaders use low-code within conventional application projects, they might want to use a standard IT DevOps automation approach alongside low-code tooling.
The impact: A growing range of use cases and user experiences can be addressed and delivered through applications that require less time and skill to create. And low-code developers will also probably coalesce into a distinct group with their own norms and subculture.
Nokia argues cloud-native is essential to 5G core
Nokia outlined five key business objectives for 5G that can only be delivered by a cloud-native environment. Those include: better bandwidth, latency, and density; the extension of services via network slicing to new enterprises, industries, and IoT markets; rapid service deployments defined by agility and efficiency; new services that go beyond traditional broadband, voice, and messaging; and the advent of digital services that harness end-to-end networking to capture more revenue.
The impact: This is most meaningful in the context of the increasing number of things that will be hooked up to the network. 4G was primarily about more and more mobile phones; 5G is only really necessary when you start connecting everything else. Whereas 4G meant richer apps on our phones, 5G has very little to do with phones at all.
APIs: The hidden business accelerator
For organisations to have a successful digital transformation, an API strategy is critical. From unlocking valuable data to speeding up development time, APIs are the humble heroes of the digital era. Those already experimenting with APIs are already feeling the benefits. For example, research has shown that 53 percent of businesses that have used APIs cite them as increasing productivity, and 29 percent claim they experienced revenue growth as a direct result of API use. When treated as discoverable and reusable products that live beyond one project, APIs help lay a flexible foundation for continuous change.
The impact: The hidden business accelerator is actually the idea that capability should be packaged in a way that allows it to be repurposed and combined in contexts that its original provider didn't anticipate.
I hope you enjoyed this list of what stood out to me from last week and come back next Monday for more open source community, market, and industry trends.
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