There’s never been a more exciting time for data. Increasing demands for size, speed, performance and reliance have propelled the data market forward at a faster rate than could have ever been anticipated, and new technologies are making some dreams for data a reality.
From open source adoption in place of legacy databases to cloud-native app stacks and more, here are seven trends driving the acceleration of data and data storage.
Oracle’s Slow Fade Drives Cloud-Native Adoption
Organizations of all sizes continue to eschew Oracle for cloud-native databases, shrinking the user base of the monolithic legacy provider. Two major trends driving this activity are the ongoing move to microservices-based redesign of applications and the rise of cloud-native deployments running in public clouds or Kubernetes. Overall, Oracle has lost market share every year since 2013, and legacy relational database players have dropped about five percentage points per year. Major organizations, such as Amazon and Salesforce, have already figured out that it’s to their benefit to use less, not more, Oracle.
Open Source DB Usage Increases
Open source databases that claimed 0% of the market 10 years ago, now make up more than 7%. It’s clear that the market is shifting and an increase in open source database adoption is on the rise. This goes against the recent trend of database and data infrastructure companies abandoning open source licenses for some, or all, of their core projects. However, as technology rapidly advances it will be in the best interest of database providers to switch to a 100% open source model, since freemium models take a significantly longer period of time for the software to mature to the same level as a true open source offering.
Furthermore, Gartner predicts that, by 2022, more than 70% of new in-house applications will be developed on an OSDBMS or OSDBMS-based dbPaaS. It’s clear that open source has proven to be the most successful approach to developing and distributing business-critical infrastructure software, driven by the benefits of reduced total cost of ownership, access to community support and innovation and compatibility with commercial databases, making it easy to migrate towards an open source solution.
Kubernetes For Stateful DBs
There has been continued growth in the adoption of both microservices and containerization. With the combination of massive adoption and the support of a large and thriving open-source community, it is clear that the dynamic nature of containerization and microservices deployments will have huge implications on fundamental application architecture. To put it simply, this is the future of how applications will be built. This is also why the adoption of Kubernetes has continued to grow.
Multi-Cloud Goes Mainstream
Multi-cloud deployments are becoming the norm in today’s enterprise. A multi-cloud approach is critically important for organizations that run on-premise, since they need to stay in a hybrid mode when moving microservices to the cloud. As a result, enterprises are widely embracing distributed SQL databases to ensure agility without the availability constraints of traditional monolithic databases, such as Oracle.
Rise of Edge Data Centers
While the rise of edge data centers is assuredly a trend, Gartner predicts that three quarters of all databases will either be deployed or migrated to a cloud platform by 2022. There will also be an increase in multi-cloud adoption as a result of the geo-distribution of data. Edge data centers are already starting to offer data services with geo-distribution, a clear sign that demand is creating supply.
Cloud-Native App Stacks Gaining in Popularity
Modern microservices-oriented architectures are becoming increasingly popular. Over time, this leads to environments with lots of microservices that should be able to notify one another of changes and store these changes in a system of record. The application stack that is getting very popular for such use-cases is a combination of:
- Spring framework to build the applications.
- Kafka as the message bus to send notification between the microservices.
- A Distributed SQL database to store the data in a scalable manner and query it efficiently.
Other application stacks that are rising in popularity are the JAMstack ( Javascript, APIs and Markup) where there is no dependency on any particular web server. Javascript frameworks such as ReactJS and VueJS have become very popular for building the frontend portion of the app. GraphQL frameworks such as Apollo and Hasura are getting increasingly adopted as efficient ways to build the API portion of the app.
Advances in innovation for data and data storage will undoubtedly continue, driven by major trends across all areas of business, as long as organizations are prepared to embrace change and hit the accelerator on their data strategies.