IT 3300 : Virtualization

Where the Field Is Going

The stack keeps rising

You've climbed it. This deck previews what's next — awareness, not mastery.

GitOps

• Git is the single source of truth for your cluster
• A controller (Argo CD / Flux) syncs the cluster to match git
• Deploy = merge a pull request; rollback = revert a commit
• Auditable, reviewable, self-correcting

CI/CD

• Pipeline: build image -> scan -> push -> update manifests -> deploy
• Push to main = tested and shipped automatically
• Ties together everything: Docker build, image scanning, k8s deploy
• Tools: GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, Tekton

Service mesh

• Istio / Linkerd add capabilities beside your app
  • mutual TLS between services
  • fine-grained traffic control (canary, retries)
  • deep observability
• You don't change application code

WebAssembly (Wasm)

• Tiny, fast, secure sandboxes — sub-millisecond starts
• A complement to containers, especially at the edge
• Emerging runtimes bring Wasm workloads to Kubernetes

Platform engineering

• Give developers a paved road: a self-service internal platform
• Kubernetes becomes the plumbing, not the interface
• Goal: developers ship without becoming cluster experts

Also on the radar

• eBPF networking/security (Cilium)
• FinOps — managing cloud cost as a first-class concern
• Confidential computing — encrypted workloads in use
• AI/ML on Kubernetes — GPUs, batch scheduling

The lasting lesson

Tools will change. The concepts won't:

• isolation, declarative desired state, self-healing, immutability,
  reproducibility.

Learn the layer below to understand the one above.

Congratulations

You built a data center from bare metal to the cloud. Go break things
in production responsibly.