Guest: Rob Hirschfeld (LinkedIn)
Company: RackN (Twitter)
Show: 2024 Prediction Series

RackN is an infrastructure automation management company that focuses on helping enterprises that are managing their infrastructure to adopt practices to reduce the friction of doing bare metal and utilizing IT infrastructure automation to increase ROI for companies running their own infrastructure. Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and Co-Founder of RackN, shares his predictions for 2024.

Platform engineering has been a hot topic this year and we are now seeing this move down to the actual infrastructure with infrastructure teams building standardized operating models. Consistency and repeatability are two of the pillars of platform engineering and many companies still lack these key areas as they try to manage their operations.

The Broadcom-VMware acquisition will likely cause chaos in the virtualization market. Many companies will be reviewing how they use virtualization and either looking for alternatives to VMware or considering if they can eliminate a virtualization requirement and run workloads on bare metal. Changes in open source and open source vendors such as in the case of HashiCorp were quite chaotic last year and these challenges will likely continue into 2024.

Another key theme in the coming year is the edge otherwise known as distributed infrastructure where the edge is treated as a series of distributed sites with a consistent, repeatable pattern across all the sites. This idea may be moving into an IT realm and discussions around it being a distributed infrastructure are starting to happen.

Key challenges in 2023 have been around governance, compliance, and security, particularly for organizations experiencing budget constraints. Some companies are pulling back on new projects in favor of having the compliance and governance they want to have with existing projects. Companies are struggling with talent shortage and retention, which exacerbates the governance and supply chain shortages. However, one of the responses to this is around tools and orchestration for IT infrastructure.

RackN’s focus for the coming year will be helping enterprise customers build standard repeatable processes. The company takes the work patterns, practices, and automation, and using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) methodology helps customers repeat and extend that work. RackN then takes those patterns they have built into their product and applies them to new environments, which benefits new customers and existing customers.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.