Cloud Native “flying like butterflies and stinging like bees” and the future
There is a word “digital natives”. It’s a term that education consultant Marc Prensky defined in his 2001 book “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants”. It refers to the generation that has learned how to think and do things that will enable them to make the most use of new digital technologies and services, as information processing capabilities have expanded with the spread of modern digital technologies. In particular, the generation born after the popularization of the Internet is sometimes said to be different from the generation born before it, not only in terms of information processing methods, but also in terms of various values.
That generation is now living in the age of AI and 5G when technology is developing at an alarming rate, new tools and methods are being created one after another, innovation is driving everything, and change is ever-present. Companies could not appeal to that generation as a customer or make them as a employee perform well if companies don’t work on putting an advanced approach in place.
With this as a backdrop, companies are now required to conduct digital transformation (DX). To achieve this, the keyword “cloud native” is gaining attention as a way to support advanced service development and business development.
As I wrote above, today is a time of rapid change due to technology. In such a situation, you need to make your business more agile and retain your current customers while always attracting new ones. These have become very important themes for the company. In today’s world, business supported by flexible IT is critical to the continuity of business. They may want to create services at the same speed as youthful startups and on the scale of a large organization, as if they were “flying like butterflies and stinging like bees.”
Here, the concept that comes up is “cloud native”. As we all know, the cloud has redefined IT in almost every industry by avoiding the increase of IT investment and labor costs of system development in the enterprise and replacing them with on-demand, unconstrained computing resources; lower IT costs mean lower barriers to entry, and how quickly new value is delivered to customers is vital for survival and prosperity.
In recent years, the evolution of various emerging services like FinTech, EdTech, LegalTech, Real Estate Tech, etc, has been remarkable, and they are offered as inexpensive services on the cloud, and many companies are seamlessly connecting their services with them to achieve innovation. Being “cloud-native” is the foundation for taking full advantage of these modern-day technological realities and creating a competitive edge in the digital era.
Well, in the first place, what is “cloud native”? You found the definition by CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) in the following URL.
While this definition centers on cloud-native technologies, recent discussions are not just focused on the technology and its architecture, but are broader in scope. For example, they want answers to the question of how multiple teams can collaborate together in system and service development, which includes enabling DevOps. I personally believe that there are five points to cloud-native practice at the moment. It’s a microservice architecture, containers, continuous delivery, DevOps culture, and the platform that integrates them.
Microservice architecture is the antithesis to traditional monolithic application development (just as the manifesto in agile development has been declared as the antithesis to waterfall development). It is the foundation for extensible and scalable application development of functionality and, from an organizational perspective, the groundwork for synergy.
In the microservice approach, applications are built as a collection of small services. Each service implements a business function and is invoked according to the required processes, and the microservices also communicate via APIs and are loosely coupled. Inevitably, this will result in a distributed application configuration, which will be more resistant to heavy load.
New developers and teams can (ideally) just focus on the microservices and the databases they handle, and not have to know the whole thing itself. It can be deployed, updated, scaled, and restarted without relying on any other service, so updates in production will be made as a normal operation. With each independent team focused on their own development, it’s much easier to expand and scale the functionality, leading to a better overall system.
Containers, of which Docker is a good example, are a kind of reaching point in the virtualization effort: a container provided on top of an operating system has its own writable file system and resource quota, and is a space where users are provided with a set of resources to run their applications. While conventional virtual servers only provide one user space on top of one OS, a container-based approach can offer multiple containers that are virtual user spaces on top of a single OS. In this approach, the wait time for a container to be carved out and made available is in seconds. In short, it is an ideal computing vehicle for deploying individual microservices.
Continuous Delivery (CD) is like a clearly automated belt conveyor. Developers will be able to take advantage of the container’s characteristics and quickly deploy features into production through continuous delivery.
Thorough continuous delivery, you release services or functions as soon as it’s ready. There is no longer any need to consolidate other changes into a single release or wait for an event like the next maintenance period. By enabling quick and frequent delivery with low risk, you will be more proactive in service and product development, get end-user feedback faster, and keep developing with the customers in mind. The ability to center on value to the customers, not just speed, is an important perspective.
And DevOps culture allows development and operation teams to work together in a customer-oriented way. This creates and maintains an atmosphere and environment that ensures that software is built, tested and released in an efficient cycle.
As enterprises implement these points and have the platform that integrates them, they move closer to cloud-native agility, flexibility and scalability, and customer-facing, interactive service deployment and business development. These will give you the courage to be more diligent in addressing the complex needs and problems of our society today. You may find an opportunity to break away from the organizational defensive, conservative, and status quo culture that plagues so many companies.
The future
There’s more to come. I’m starting to see what’s ahead.
With this integrated platform as a back-end foundation, companies will be able to develop strategies for the new business models that are emerging in the advanced AI age. Some of the most successful startups embody and practice it as if it’s a given. Maybe that’s because digital natives are working on the foundation of cloud natives. That business model is sometimes referred to as the AI Agency model, but it doesn’t currently have a commonly used name yet. I call it the Exploration & Exploitation model. This is also the answer to how humans can take leadership in the face of ever-evolving and increasingly influential AI. I hope to write a post about it soon.
