This article is based on industry expert predictions originally published on techerati.com in late 2019, ahead of the 2020 calendar year. The views are those of the named individuals at their respective organizations at the time of writing.
Setting the Scene: Kubernetes Takes Center Stage
As 2019 drew to a close, Kubernetes had already cemented its position as the de facto container orchestration platform for modern cloud infrastructure. Cloud and infrastructure monitoring company Datadog, in a survey of thousands of its customers, found that 45 percent were actively using Kubernetes. VMware’s announcement that it planned to transition its enterprise virtualization platform to one built around Kubernetes only reinforced this reality. IBM’s $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat — and its subsequent commitment to integrating OpenShift, Red Hat’s Kubernetes distribution, into a new multi-cloud strategy — signaled that enterprise software giants were all-in on the technology.
Against this backdrop, six senior technology leaders looked ahead to 2020 and shared their predictions across four major themes: competitive multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategy, the limits and maturation of Kubernetes, workload repatriation, and the growing importance of unified data management.
Prediction 1: Hybrid Becomes the New Multi-Cloud
Lee James, CTO EMEA, Rackspace
Despite the undisputed growth of multi-cloud adoption, James argued that many enterprises were simultaneously maintaining investment in private cloud infrastructure — driven by security requirements, existing data center leasing arrangements, or because on-premises simply performed better for specific workloads. He noted that even the UK Government was revisiting its “cloud first” policy in favor of a “cloud right” approach, acknowledging that public cloud is not universally the correct answer.
The major hyperscalers had already responded to this reality. Azure Arc, Google Cloud Anthos, and AWS Outposts were all designed to extend public cloud capabilities into private data centers — blurring the line between public and private infrastructure.
James predicted that 2020 would see intense competition between the three largest cloud providers — AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud — along with VMware, as they each worked to position Kubernetes as the key to unlocking hybrid and multi-cloud for enterprise customers. For end users, the decision would ultimately come down to which platform delivered the best fit and the best value.
Prediction 2: Kubernetes Matures — and Its Limits Become Clearer
Stephan Fabel, Director of Product, Canonical
Fabel offered a more nuanced view. While Kubernetes had become integral to modern cloud infrastructure and many organizations were doubling down on it — restructuring DevOps teams around it, experimenting with serverless workloads, and automating data orchestration — he cautioned that a more critical perspective was emerging.
As Kubernetes moved from experimental deployments into production at scale, teams were increasingly encountering real operational challenges: security vulnerabilities, unplanned downtime, and the specialist skills required to manage clusters effectively. Fabel predicted that 2020 would see some organizations question whether Kubernetes was the right tool for every workload, and that the community would mature accordingly — either bringing in specialist vendors or being more selective about where Kubernetes was applied.
Fabel also addressed cloud repatriation — the trend of moving workloads back from public cloud to on-premises infrastructure. He argued this would not represent a wholesale retreat from the cloud, but rather a deliberate hybrid strategy. As organizations scaled, the economics of public cloud became harder to justify for stable, predictable workloads, making on-premises infrastructure more cost-effective. Public cloud providers, he predicted, would respond by reaching deeper into customer data centers to capture this hybrid demand.
Prediction 3: Organizations Need a Single, Standard Kubernetes Strategy
Michael Cote, Director of Marketing, Pivotal
With Kubernetes already the leading platform for containerized and cloud-native applications, Cote argued that the next challenge for enterprises was not adoption, but standardization. Organizations running multiple parallel Kubernetes initiatives — different teams using different distributions or managed services — would waste resources and slow down their broader cloud-native strategy.
His prescription was pragmatic:
- Choose a Kubernetes distribution or managed service and commit to it as the organizational standard.
- Identify a small set of high-value applications to migrate first.
- Run a genuine Proof of Concept (PoC) — deploying real applications, not just test workloads — to validate the platform choice across the full development-to-production lifecycle.
- Evaluate results honestly: if the PoC succeeds, expand adoption; if it fails, diagnose the cause and iterate — potentially with a different platform.
Cote predicted that the bulk of the work in 2020 would be application modernization: identifying legacy workloads that could realistically be migrated to the chosen Kubernetes platform and executing those migrations in a structured, measured way.
Prediction 4: Every Application Will Become Mission-Critical
Dave Russell, VP of Enterprise Strategy, Veeam
Russell’s prediction focused on the changing nature of application availability expectations. As businesses become wholly dependent on digital infrastructure, the traditional distinction between mission-critical and non-mission-critical applications becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. The 2019 Veeam Cloud Data Management Report indicated that IT decision-makers said their organizations could tolerate a maximum of two hours of downtime for mission-critical applications — but Russell argued that in practice, almost no application can afford to be unavailable for that long.
He predicted that Infrastructure as Code (IaC) would continue to move into mainstream adoption, enabling organizations to define infrastructure declaratively and deploy it consistently across multiple storage environments and locations — reducing both provisioning time and human error. Software-defined approaches, including IaC and cloud-native architectures, were presented not just as cost-saving measures but as essential tools for delivering the agility and scalability that always-on applications demand.
Prediction 5: Companies Will Step Back from All-In Cloud Strategies
Patrick O’Keeffe, VP of Development Engineering, Quest
O’Keeffe described a recognizable pattern playing out in many enterprises: lift and shift infrastructure VMs to the cloud, discover that costs have increased rather than decreased, move some workloads back to on-premises, and then selectively build new applications using cloud-native PaaS and DBaaS services with more favorable cost profiles.
After a year of aggressive cloud migration, he predicted that 2020 would be a year of re-evaluation. Organizations that had committed fully to a single cloud provider would reconsider that approach after experiencing high costs and reduced flexibility. The likely outcome was a move toward either multi-cloud or hybrid cloud:
- Hybrid cloud allows organizations to run some workloads on a public cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP) while keeping sensitive or mission-critical data on-premises.
- Multi-cloud gives individual teams or business units the flexibility to use the cloud service best suited to their specific needs, rather than being locked into a single vendor.
Prediction 6: Customers Will Demand Unified Management Layers Across Clouds
Gijsbert Janssen van Doorn, Technology Evangelist, Zerto
Janssen van Doorn’s prediction was focused on operational visibility. While hybrid and multi-cloud adoption was already underway, he argued that 2020 would mark a shift in what customers demanded from those environments: not just the underlying infrastructure, but a unified management layer sitting above it.
Many organizations had already deployed backup-in-the-cloud and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solutions, but these often operated in silos. What they now needed was a single pane of glass providing visibility into cost across all cloud environments, knowledge of where data resided at any given time, confirmation that workloads were protected, and the ability to move workloads between clouds as requirements changed.
Key Themes Across All Predictions
Looking across all six predictions, several consistent themes emerge that were relevant both heading into 2020 and continue to shape cloud strategy today:
- Kubernetes consolidation: The platform had won the container orchestration wars, but the next challenge was standardizing on a single organizational approach rather than allowing fragmented adoption.
- Hybrid and multi-cloud as the default: Pure public cloud strategies were giving way to more nuanced approaches that combined public cloud, private infrastructure, and managed services based on workload requirements.
- The maturation of cloud economics: Organizations were becoming more sophisticated about understanding when cloud made financial sense and when on-premises or hybrid architectures delivered better value.
- Software-defined operations: IaC, cloud-native architectures, and unified management platforms were all seen as essential for operating at the scale and availability that modern applications demand.
- Data visibility and protection: As infrastructure spread across multiple clouds and on-premises environments, knowing where data lived and ensuring it was protected became a central operational concern.
These predictions, made at the close of 2019, reflect a cloud industry that was moving rapidly from early experimentation to enterprise-scale production deployment — and grappling with the operational, financial, and organizational complexity that comes with it.