What technologies to follow and learn in 2018!

First of all: 1. I work for Red Hat Inc. 2. Opinions are my own and not the views of my employer.

2017 is gone and with it a great year for technology and innovation. Now, it is time to look a little bit into the future and talk about couple technologies that I believe that will become more relevant in this new year 2018.

1. Managed Security

Last year was a terrible year for IT Security after multiple high profile breaches like the ones that happened to Equifax, BCBS, Alterix, and a few other companies.
I do believe that this year security will be top-priority for CIOs and CTOs across the world, this will manifest by bringing external vendors to complement in-house security teams as part of the IT security strategies.
Managed Security service providers have a great opportunity in front of them in 2018: to help minimize breaches, drive compliance and innovate in new ways to secure the cloud.

2. Blockchain

Blockchain is, without doubt, one of my favorite technologies out there. Initially created for the cryptocurrency use case, is a great way to distribute and secure data.
For 2018, I believe that blockchain will become more mainstream, using their “distributed ledger” capabilities for multiple use cases in banking, trading, asset management, decentralized records, government, insurance, and healthcare.

3. Serverless

Serverless computing will continue to grow in 2018 by making the developer's life more comfortable and the ability for a faster time to market a reality. AWS Lambda should continue to grow this year, but I do believe what will make it serverless an exciting technology to follow is the rise of other players in this arena, like Microsoft Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions, and the opensource Apache OpenWhisk project.

4. Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence will continue to evolve in 2018 with more companies investing in AI initiatives. Here are couple use cases that I believe will be the top priority for AI and Machine Learning this year:

• Self-driving cars and ships
• Better personal digital assistants and perfecting the way that we interact with them (voice)
• More and more healthcare applications
• IT Security applications of AI will grow

5. IoT will continue growing

Internet of Things (IoT) should continue to grow in 2018, generating more and more data (that will be used by companies to take better decisions using Machine Learning and AI). For IoT providers, couple things will be in their top priorities:

• Securing devices and data
• Market focus will be beyond the consumer
• More IoT startups will be created
• Focus on home automation and interoperability with other devices
• Edge computing application to IoT will grow

6. Kubernetes

Kubernetes will win the PaaS war in 2018! How will this happen?
Grow of Kubernetes Certified Service providers
Adoption of big players of Kubernetes as the core of their container offerings, like:

• Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and OpenShift Online
• Microsoft Azure Container Service
• Google Kubernetes Engine
• Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes
• Oracle Container Services
• Kubernetes will go beyond containers, managing virtualization with KubeVirt.

7. Bare Metal is back!

Bare Metal should grow in 2018 with more use cases that require bigger, specialized, and dedicated hardware. The comeback of bare metal will be possible thanks to cloud computing: allowing provisioning, configuration, management, and lifecycle as-a-service of physical hardware.
The bare metal needs will be addressed in public and private clouds, with projects like OpenStack Bare Metal Provisioning (Ironic) leading in the private cloud space.

8. Automation and Configuration Management

Adopting DevOps and Cloud Computing is an almost impossible task without automation and configuration management. In 2018 automation and configuration management tools like Ansible and Ansible Tower by Red Hat will go beyond cloud and datacenter automation. They will drive the adoption of serverless computing and be used in other use cases like application migrations, operating system modernization, and network device orchestration and configuration.

And by the way, Happy New Year 2018