Kubernetes has emerged as the defacto option for managing containers, while microservices serve as the underlying distributed architecture of Kubernetes clusters. The continued rise of multicloud infrastructures is also seen as a conduit for the continued adoption of microservices for Kubernetes deployments for such widely distributed infrastructures. The need to create applications and manage such diverse infrastructures in this rapidly expanding multicloud universe.

But, suddenly, the novel coronavirus worldwide pandemic has turned the world on its head in ways we have yet to fully realize.

In this The New Stack Makers podcast, Ankur Singla, founder and CEO at Software as a Service (SaaS) provider Volterra, discusses the profound influences Kubernetes, microservices, multicloud environments, and open source have had on computing and IT today — and what their impacts may be in a COVID-19 world.

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COVID-19 throws a big wrench into everything, Singla said. “The first thing we realized with lots of our large enterprise customers is that corporate networks are becoming a big bottleneck,” Singla said. “And in order to reduce the load, many of the enterprises are already looking at how can they quickly migrate their apps from private data centers to the cloud, because the network to the cloud is a lot better than a network to private networks.”

The migration to the cloud also involves a “move to SaaS services,” Singla said. “SaaS services obviously require scale, and more and more of them are going microservices,” Singla said.

It is safe to assume that a particular technology or architecture has become mainstream after surviving an initial hype cycle and becoming uniformly accepted and reliable. A technology associated with cost savings and demonstrably improved efficiencies is also another criterion used to determine whether a particular technology has acquired mainstream status. One can thus arguably assume microservices are on their to achieving mainstream status. “More and more enterprises are migrating to SaaS services, and SaaS is all about scale — and scaling is a lot easier with microservices,” Singla said.

Singla began to see the potential of microservices about five years ago when large enterprises largely had adopted microservices. “But it was becoming very clear to me that that would be an architecture paradigm, and increasingly so with serverless — so, then, the paradigm shift was starting to happen. And we thought that was a great opportunity to start a new company that helped solve many of the problems of going mainstream to multiple cloud providers and being able to build highly distributed edge locations … with the convergence of distributed applications and data,” Singla said. “And we said, ‘it’s a great time to start a company to solve the problem of distributed application data.’ So, that’s the background on Volterra.”

Feature image by PIRO4D from Pixabay.