3 Emerging Cloud Technologies You Should Know

In previous articles, we’ve discussed four notable trends in cloud computing and how the rise of microservices and the public cloud has led to a whole new class of open source cloud computing projects. These projects leverage the elasticity of the public cloud and enable applications designed and built to run on it.

Early on in cloud computing, there was a migration of existing applications to Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft’s Azure. Virtually any app that ran on hardware in private data centers could be virtualized and deployed to the cloud. Now with a mature cloud market, more applications are being written and deployed directly to the cloud and are often referred to as being cloud native.

Here we’ll explore three emerging cloud technologies and mention a few key projects in each area. For a more in-depth explanation and to see a full list of all the projects across six broad categories, download our free 2016 Guide to the Open Cloud report.  

Cloud Native Applications

While there is no textbook definition, the self-described cloud native in its simplest definition indicates applications that have been designed to run on modern distributed systems environments capable of scaling to tens of thousands of nodes. The old mantra, “No one ever got fired for buying IBM (or Microsoft),” has changed to the new slogan of “No one is going to get fired for moving to the cloud.” Rather than looking at hard and fast qualifiers for cloud-native, we need to look at the design patterns that are being applied to this evolving breed of applications.

In the pre-cloud days we saw virtualization take hold where entire operating systems were portable inside of virtual machines. That way a machine could move from server to server based on its compatibility with hypervisors like VMware, KVM or Xen Project. In recent years we have seen the level of abstraction at the application layer where applications are container-based and run in portable units that are easily moved from server to server regardless of hypervisor due to container technologies like Docker and CoreOS-sponsored rkt (pronounced rocket).

Containers

A more recent addition in the cloud era is the rise of the container, most notably Docker and rkt. These application hosts are an evolution of previous innovations including Linux control groups (cgroups) and LXC, and an even further abstraction to make applications more portable. This allows them to be moved from development environments to production without the need for reconfiguration.

Applications are now deployed either from registries or through continuous deployment systems to containers that are orchestrated using tools like Ansible, Puppet, or Chef.

Finally, to scale out these applications, the use of schedulers such as Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Mesos, and Diego coordinate these containers across machines and nodes.

Unikernels

Another emerging technology that bears some similarity to containers is that of unikernels. A unikernel is a pared-down operating system, which is combined with a single application into a unikernel application and which is typically run within a virtual machine. Unikernels are sometimes called library operating systems, because they include libraries that enable applications to use hardware and network protocols in combination with a set of policies for access control and isolation of the network layer. There were systems in the 1990s called Exokernel and Nemesis, but today popular unikernels include MirageOS and OSv. Because unikernel applications can be used independently and deployed across diverse environments, unikernels can create highly specialized and isolated services and have become increasingly used for developing applications in a microservices architecture.

In the series that follows, we’ll dive into each category of open source cloud technology and list the most useful, influential, and promising open source projects with which IT managers and practitioners can build, manage, and monitor their current and future mission-critical cloud resources.  

Learn more about trends in open source cloud computing and see the full list of the top open source cloud computing projects. Download The Linux Foundation’s Guide to the Open Cloud report today!

Read the other articles in this series:

4 Notable Trends in Open Source Cloud Computing

Trends in the Open Source Cloud: A Shift to Microservices and the Public Cloud

Why the Open Source Cloud Is Important