The impact of Cloud Native on Enterprise IT

The “cloud” connects data, people, and processes in new ways, allowing enterprises to embrace possibilities enabled by technology. However, to thrive in the digital economy, business leaders need to do more than just adopt cloud. They need to leverage the latest innovative technologies to close the gap between business and IT, optimize processes, and continuously create new value for customers.

Enterprises must drastically enhance their ability to build, test, and deploy software. That’s the reason why Cloud Native application architectures and continuous delivery practices are top of mind for business leaders. Finding and deploying the right architecture can reduce software development times from months to hours. It can mean the difference between you beating your competitors — or being beaten by them.

Why move to Cloud Native?

While only 15% of enterprise workloads run in Cloud Native environments today, Capgemini expects it to double by 2020 — a 100% deployment increase. What are the three top factors driving Cloud Native adoption?

1. Improved business agility (74%)

2. Enhanced collaboration with external partners (70%)

3. Enriched customer experiences (66%)

In a nutshell, moving to Cloud Native allows enterprises to innovate faster, increase competitive differentiation, and keep pace with evolving customer behavior.

So, what is Cloud Native?

Cloud Native: The official definition

According to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), “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.”

That’s quite a mouthful, so let’s simplify it.

While “cloud washed” solutions are legacy, on-premises software running in a virtualized data center and rebranded as cloud software, Cloud Native software is designed for the cloud, built in the cloud, and runs in the cloud. To meet the definition of “Cloud Native,” the entire application lifecycle must take place on a cloud platform: development, testing, debugging, deployment, execution, and updates.

The latest Cloud Native computing trend, serverless computing, offers significant value by eliminating the resources, infrastructure, and tools you need to manage your cloud infrastructure. A serverless application runs in event-triggered, stateless compute containers that are ephemeral and fully managed by the cloud provider. Since each invocation may be short-lived, pricing depends on the number of executions rather than pre-purchased compute capacity. Serverless computing reduces costs and allows you to focus on your core product without the stress of managing servers or runtimes, either in the public cloud or on-premises.

Who’s driving Cloud Native?

Initially founded in 2015 to promote containers, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation — or CNCF — serves as the vendor-neutral home for many of the fastest-growing open-source projects, fostering collaboration between developers, end users, and vendors. Initially founded by leading tech companies including Google, Red Hat, Twitter, Intel, Cisco, IBM, Docker, and VMware, CNCF comprises over 500 companies and 53,000 independent contributors. Together, they host, incubate, and nurture promising Cloud Native projects designed to simplify the development, deployment, and management of Cloud Native applications. These include:

· Kubernetes: A system for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications

· Prometheus: A modern monitoring and alerting system with powerful queries and visualization

· Envoy: An edge and service proxy designed to increase the observability of distributed services

Critical enablers for Cloud Native applications

Now we understand what Cloud Native is and who’s behind it, let’s have a look at four of the key enablers for Cloud Native applications to deliver on the promise of agility and speed:

· Microservices: Built as a collection of minimalistic, loosely-coupled services, microservices are developed, tested, deployed, and scaled independently. They allow developers to update and release enhancements for a single service instead of the complete application. As a result, applications are more composable, agile, resilient, and elastic. The architecture also allows different teams to simultaneously work on different microservices for the same application, accelerating delivery of new features and functions.

· Containers: Tools and methodologies used to develop, organize, and run microservices, containers are smaller and more agile than virtual machines. They encompass everything required to run an application or microservice: a runtime environment with code, system tools, system libraries, and settings. Since they’re independent of software running on physical machines, they eliminate application-portability challenges and speed up application delivery.

· Agile: A new methodology designed to match modern software capabilities by delivering work in small, consumable increments, agile software development embraces a culture of collaboration and continuous development. It’s an iterative approach enabling teams to deliver increased value faster and with less stress.

· DevOps: Automating the processes often causing friction between software development and IT teams, DevOps promotes a culture of collaboration. It enables software to be built, tested, and released faster and with superior reliability.

Impact of Cloud Native for enterprise IT

There are many benefits to Cloud Native. Keeping them in mind and prioritizing them to meet the needs of your business can help you deliver increased value, enhance the customer experience, and save money.

· Accelerated release schedules: Time-to-market makes the difference between leaders and laggards, the disrupters and the disrupted. So the faster an enterprise can envisage, build, and ship increased value to its customers with Cloud Native apps, the more likely it is to succeed.

· Increased resiliency: While downtime used to be accepted, it’s no longer the case. Users expect applications to be available 24x7. If they’re not, you’ll read about it on the front page. With technologies like microservices, containers, and Kubernetes, enterprises can build fault-tolerant applications with built-in resiliency and self-healing capabilities. The impact of failures that occur is limited to the specific service. The application stays up, user impact is nominal, and the cost of downtime is minimized.

· Superior customer experiences: With customers expecting regular incremental enhancements, Cloud Native offers the platform you need to iterate continuously and ship new features faster. It also provides the opportunity to expand a mobile-first approach to all application development, extending human-centered design practices to internal applications to empower employees and increase staff satisfaction.

· Ease of management: Serverless computing allows enterprises to upload code to a hosted platform without having to worry about provisioning cloud instances, configuring networks, allocating storage, or cloud portability. Many innovative services currently in incubation with the CNCF address the demand for enhanced manageability of distributed operations. These include:

· gRPC: An interconnect to enable the last mile of computing and microservices

· OpenTracing: Distributed tracing to profile, monitor, and debug modern distributed software architectures

· Jaeger: Monitoring and troubleshooting transactions in complex distributed systems, including microservices

· Reduced costs: With industry-wide support for microservices, containers, and Kubernetes, infrastructure and tools are quickly being standardized, and, complemented by an open source model, costs are rapidly decreasing. With pay-per-use constructs measured in milliseconds, even the smallest of companies can benefit from serverless Cloud Native computing.

· Avoid vendor lock-in: Three-year locked-in licensing for proprietary hardware and software is a thing of the past. Enterprises are flocking to hybrid- and multi-cloud platforms, taking advantage of the freedom the proliferation of open source and cloud technologies offers.

What the future holds

While Cloud Native seems the way to go based on the list above, challenges are inevitable. These include making the business case, managing complexity and change, and addressing the skills shortages. My next blog will address these challenges and outline how you can minimize the impact.

In the meantime, feel free to contact us to find out how we can help your business realize the promise of Cloud Native.

About Turing Technology Services

Turing Technology Services is a consultancy business assisting enterprise organizations with their DevOps, CI/CD, and Cloud Native journeys.