How Modern Infrastructure And Machine Intelligence Will Disrupt The Industry
Modern infrastructure and machine intelligence are two trends that will have an impact on every entity of the industry including platform companies, independent software vendors, global system integrators and emerging startups.
The convergence of modern infrastructure and machine intelligence will create a perfect storm for the IT ecosystem. While a few will take advantage of this trend, the majority will struggle to stay relevant in the industry. This trend will result in much bigger disruption than what was caused by cloud computing and SaaS.
What are modern infrastructure and machine intelligence? Are they same as cloud computing and artificial intelligence? How is machine intelligence different from machine learning and artificial intelligence?
Cloud computing has fundamentally changed the IT infrastructure landscape. The attributes like self-service, pay-by-use, elasticity and automation added a new dimension to infrastructure management.
Modern infrastructure is not the same as cloud computing. It is predominantly driven by emerging use cases, and business problems that cloud alone cannot adequately address. The rise of containers, container orchestration, microservices, cloud-native architectures, container-defined-storage and container-defined-networking lead us to the next phase of infrastructure.
Next-generation infrastructure will be built on the firm foundation laid by containers. Like the way VMs abstract the underlying physical hardware, containers will make virtual machines irrelevant. Container images will become the de facto mechanism for packaging, distributing and deploying software. With containers becoming the new VMs, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) will gradually transform into Container as a Service (CaaS).
Serverless computing and edge computing will become the layers that expose core computing capabilities. Applications will run in a distributed mode where certain components will be deployed as containers in the cloud and the remaining running in the edge layer. A significant part of the code will move into serverless computing to handle events triggered by the cloud and edge. Next generation content delivery networks (CDN) will be able to run code across edge locations making the applications truly distributed.
Infrastructure as Code, DevOps and automation are essential for managing modern infrastructure. They become as ubiquitous as Linux shell scripts for automating workload deployment, scaling and management.
In the era of AI, GPUs are becoming as prominent as CPUs. With container platforms gaining access to GPU clusters, data scientists can package algorithms as container images which are deployed at scale to perform training of the machine learning models. The trained models are also deployed as containers used for scalable inference.
One technology that is at the front and center of modern infrastructure is Kubernetes. It is winning mindshare and market share to become the Linux of containers.
