The State of Application Services 2019: Will Cloud Lose its Crown?

For five years now my cohort Cindy Borovick and I have delved deep into the State of Application Delivery.

Over that time, we've seen the importance of application services continue to grow even as strategic trends exerted pressure and influence on their form factor and delivery locations. That evaluation of application services has been validated year after year as public cloud providers and emerging technology darlings like Kubernetes have touted their unique value by showcasing support for an increasing number of native application services. Whether it's SDN or ingress control, service mesh or API gateways, the market continues to show the strategic value of application services by implementing and integrating with them.

With new technology comes new challenges and opportunities that lead to new application services. Over time we've added to the robust list that organizations across the globe use every day to scale, secure, and speed up applications in a plethora of environments. Today, we're tracking 32 distinct application services across traditional, cloud, and container environments.

Over the years, cloud has reigned supreme as the most strategic. In all its forms—public, on-premises private, and SaaS—cloud has maintained its place as having the biggest strategic impact on organizations. That impact has been felt in the application services deployed, in the tools and technologies used to automate and orchestrate IT, and even in the evolution of team structures inside organizations.

But cloud is aging as a technology and maturing as a product. It's no longer the wunderkind of the digital world. It is just another option, an alternative environment, a selection on a provisioning portal. Heydays pass, and with them go the crown.

Yes, I am prone to melodramatic hyperbole, why do you ask?

Cloud may indeed have lost its crown to some other up and coming, fresh faced technology trend. Or maybe it hasn't…?

To find out, you'll have to come back next week—same bat blog, same bat channel—when we release the State of Application Services 2019. Cindy and I have spent months executing, analyzing, and working with the rest of the team here at F5 to deliver a brand new digital experience to go along with a brand new report name. We think you'll find the results surprising in some ways and validating in others. In all cases it will definitely provide valuable insights into the state of the market and highlight those tools, technologies, and trends that are driving the digital economy to new heights.

Long live cloud and #AppServices