Four Challenges Facing all Cloud-Native Architects
Cloud-native architectures have revolutionized the way businesses operate their applications and services in the cloud. This shift provides immense benefits, such as increased agility, scalability and cost savings.
However, moving to a cloud-native architecture also poses unique challenges that must be addressed. What are some of the critical challenges facing cloud-native architectures?
Here are the top four challenges facing all cloud-native software architects.
Challenge One: Balancing Complexity in Microservice Applications
Microservices-based applications provide great advantages to the development of cloud-native applications. They allow for effective organizational scaling to increase the number of developers working on large, complex applications without getting in each other’s way. They allow complexity in the application to be localized and isolated so that it can be better understood by those owning a particular service.
But there is a balance. The smaller you make your services, the more services you need. The more services you need, the more complex the interaction is between those services.
So, in an attempt to reduce the complexity of individual services by making them smaller, you’ve increased the complexity of the system as a whole.
Finding the right balance in service size between too large (resulting in localized complexity within the services themselves) and too small (resulting in increased interconnection complexity) is a balancing act. Finding the right size for your services is a challenge facing every cloud-native architect.
Challenge Two: Automating Operations and Management
Automation is perhaps the most significant advantage the cloud provides to applications and application development. Cloud architects need to extensively use automation to manage their cloud environment effectively.
Automation assists cloud architects in scaling, resource provisioning, creating and managing infrastructure and deploying new and updated features and capabilities.
How to effectively create automation systems and processes without increasing overall system complexity is a challenge all cloud architects face. Building too complex an automation system results in fragile systems and procedures. Yet not leveraging enough automation means leaving cloud advantages behind. Balancing between these two extremes is an important challenge for cloud architects.
Challenge Three: Clarifying Ownership and Responsibilities
Simply taking your single large monolith and splitting it into tens or hundreds of services doesn’t instantly make your application more supportable. You must also structure your organization in the same way you structure your application. Individual services must have clear ownership by teams, and those teams must have full and complete responsibility for all aspects of managing that service—from developing it to testing it to deploying it to operating and supporting it. All aspects of the service life cycle are the responsibility of the team that owns it. This avoids “throw it over the wall” and buck-passing behaviors that can devastate an organization and negatively impact your incident response time and management.
STOSA — Single Team-Oriented Service Architecture — is an architectural model for structuring your development organization to effectively operate and manage your cloud-native, microservices-based application at scale. STOSA talks about the power of service ownership and ownership responsibility. It’s an essential part of any organizational strategy for operating a modern application.
Challenge Four: Maintaining a Secure Cloud Environment
The cloud provides great advantages to application development and operation. But lurking in the back of many people’s minds is a basic question: Is the public cloud secure enough for my application?
Building a safe and secure application environment is a critical requirement for all applications. The cloud can provide a great set of features and capabilities to help you build a safe and secure environment. Keeping your application secure in the cloud is practical and achievable. In fact, it’s easier to keep your application safe in the cloud than it is in your own data center. Understanding concepts such as the principle of shared responsibility are a critical resource in developing a secure cloud environment.
But microservices can also create additional and unwanted vulnerability points that bad actors can leverage to compromise your application. In most applications, all it takes is a single compromised service to compromise your entire application stack. Understanding how to keep microservice-based applications secure, both inside and out, is fundamental to maintaining a safe and secure cloud-native application.
Cloud-native architectures have transformed how businesses operate their applications and services in the cloud, offering numerous benefits such as increased agility, scalability and cost savings. However, cloud-native software architects face unique challenges in developing and operating these applications. They require a strong focus on balancing complexity, organizing for success and maintaining a secure environment.
