2022 may have been the year of Kubernetes and cloud native, but 2023 will be the year that all companies, not just those with the budgets to build an enormous talent base of advanced developers, leverage the transformative power of these technologies.

All companies are facing significant challenges with deploying applications on cloud native infrastructure. This is because the Kubernetes/CNCF ecosystem is overwhelmingly complex. Most companies continue to move forward due to the immense benefits such as time-to-market. However, only the most well-funded dev teams can navigate the complexity to deliver true value with good ROI to their organizations. Thus the appeal of fully managed low code and “infrastructure from code” PaaS approaches that mask this complexity. Serverless offerings were an outstanding innovation that helped to alleviate some of these issues, but the ability to mask complexity and build general-purpose mission-critical apps that can scale remained elusive.

I believe that 2023 is the year that tools deliver the right abstractions of this complexity to leverage low code and “infrastructure from code” concepts. This will be accomplished by vendors offering solutions that climb this “ladder” of abstractions further up the chain towards the fully managed NoOps model without compromising on what we offer developers—the ability to focus on building business logic in the language of their choice. Far from simple Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) offerings, we will see vertically integrated general platforms that solve almost all issues for developers, reducing complexity while cutting time to market, and enabling smaller firms to compete on a more even footing with far larger organizations.