What to Expect When You Go Cloud-Native

Many organizations today have made the choice to adopt cloud-native applications and architectures and are seeing positive results. But some are still struggling with adoption challenges including increased complexity, costs and an ongoing talent shortage.

Despite those adoption challenges, going cloud-native is still an incredibly sound investment and it can help your organization experience many benefits. Before delving into the reasons to justify cloud-native, we must touch on the various definitions of cloud-native. This will give us a baseline understanding to build on.

Cloud providers deliver products or services to their customers. Some of those services are cloud-native in the sense that the service is harnessing the powers of cloud computing such as self-service, auto-scaling and high availability. More often than not, such services are tied to a particular cloud provider and it becomes hard to move elsewhere, leading to cloud vendor lock-in. 

Some vendors sell products or services that are branded cloud-native because they integrate nicely with certain cloud providers or have shiny features built for the cloud. Without a deeper understanding of what’s meant by cloud-native here, this can prompt vendor lock-in.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation(CNCF), part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation, is dedicated to driving the adoption of this approach by fostering and sustaining an ecosystem of open source and vendor-neutral projects and which put together the first definition of cloud-native in 2018. The CNCF defines cloud-native as:

“Cloud native technologies empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private and hybrid clouds. Containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure and declarative APIs exemplify this approach. These techniques enable loosely coupled systems that are resilient, manageable and observable. Combined with robust automation, they allow engineers to make high-impact changes frequently and predictably with minimal toil.”

Though the definition is still a work-in-progress, we can conclude that cloud-native goes beyond a particular set of technologies to encompass processes and practices that enable organizations to build more resilient systems and accelerate innovation while remaining technology-, cloud- and vendor-neutral.

There are three major reasons to consider making the move to a cloud-native approach today even if your organization and team are not ready to actually make the move now. 

Cloud-Native Business Value 

Cloud-native can provide tremendous business value to organizations. Cloud-native can help you drive down compute costs, shrink time-to-market, boost productivity and enhance security in the long term. 

For example, Kubernetes, the de facto standard container orchestration software to manage applications containers at scale is one of the most widely used open source technologies after the Linux operating system. There are more than 50 Kubernetes case studies published on the project website showcasing how IT leaders were able to realize business value using Kubernetes and cloud-native in general. CNCF regularly publishes case studies sharing the impact cloud-native is having on their business. This includes practices such as continuous delivery, monitoring, logging, tracing, GitOps and more.     

Innovation 

Cloud-native can help IT leaders build a future-proof organization that can adapt, innovate and move fast while responding to challenges and opportunities.

If you look at cloud-native computing today, it can help us understand what’s coming next. From edge computing to digital trust or blockchain to promising advancements in quantum computing—all of which are going to change the way we live, work and do business.  

For example, all major cloud providers today provide cloud-based quantum computing services. Such services allow developers to gain access to actual quantum computers or simulators and pay on demand. Being able to leverage cloud-native helps organizations to prepare themselves for the future by adapting to different ways of thinking about applications, infrastructure and computing in general.   

Culture 

Cloud-native is more about shifting the mindset around building software. Similar to Agile, Lean and DevOps, it encourages making mistakes early and learning from them, automating as much as possible, collaborating between different teams and rapidly releasing software to learn and improve.   

Such a culture can offer an opportunity for team members to learn quickly, increase productivity and boost engagement. While cloud-native leverages many technologies, it’s more about shifting that culture and mindset than using a particular technology.  

For instance, you might be using plenty of cloud-native technologies to build software in your organization but not releasing software fast enough due to a culture that doesn’t tolerate experimentation and failing fast. While there are many factors that influence organizational culture including values, policies, etc., cloud-native can play a role by improving productivity and building a culture of learning and experimentation.

Going cloud-native is not for every application, team or organization. There are just as many ways to fail with cloud-native as there are ways to succeed. So, instead of going all-in all at once,  IT leaders should focus on understanding what cloud-native is, understand the pros and cons and why it might or might not be suitable for their apps or teams as well as where it might be of value in their organizations.

Mostafa Radwan

Mostafa Radwan is a consultant who specializes in cloud and cloud-native computing. He started his career as a software engineer before getting in the trenches doing application and production support. He enjoys partnering with CIOs and IT leaders to adopt DevOps and cloud-native technologies and drive better business outcomes. When not serving clients or tinkering with technology, Mostafa likes to read, bike, and travel the world with his family. He can be reached at [email protected]

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