Cloud native technology can future proof your startup
By Ben Hill, Director Oracle for Startups
When starting a software company, there is so much to think about that it can be overwhelming. As director of a team of cloud architects dedicated to helping startups scale up, we work with startup dev teams every day and understand the challenges they face to ensure their solutions are secure, flexible, and scalable. Modern cloud solutions, like containers and serverless architectures, make it easier to scale and extend across clouds when startups hit their growth spurts.
In a startup’s early days, the immediate focus can shift from building a prototype to proving a concept to launching a service to winning (and then pleasing) customers. It’s easy enough to lose sight of the challenges that can arise if everything goes successfully. No entrepreneur wants to be a victim of their own success. That’s what can happen when an IT architecture that is perfectly viable for a small-scale operation can’t scale to meet growing demands.
Luckily, modern startups don’t have to worry about the problems of rapidly adding capacity, extending their workloads across multiple clouds, or getting locked-in to a single infrastructure provider. By using cloud native architectures like containers and serverless, they can protect their compute stack — and their businesses — for any path that lies ahead.
eBook: Startups Leap Forward with Modern Cloud Solutions
We see this in action with companies in our program who possessed the foresight to build their products using Kubernetes and Oracle Cloud Functions, a serverless platform based on the Fn Project framework. Because of the flexibility and portability inherent in those approaches, these startups were prepared for their growth spurts and never needed to go back and re-architect their systems. Not only could they readily scale infrastructure to meet surging demand for their services, but they could switch cloud providers or adopt multicloud strategies as they saw fit.
Future-proofing with Kubernetes at Sauce Video
Sauce Video, a startup Oracle acquired last year, offers us a great example.
The London-based company built its video content creation and collaboration platform using Kubernetes and Istio service mesh. That product was first deployed on Amazon Web Services, but when Sauce was ready to migrate to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, that containerized architecture made for an easy shift.
When first founded in 2017, Sauce couldn’t have known how fast it would grow or what kind of cloud infrastructure it would need years later. Designing with cloud native methodologies and technologies gave Sauce the freedom to switch cloud providers without forcing a major overhaul of its back-end system.
While Kubernetes manages some of the world’s largest server environments, it’s important to remember it can orchestrate containers at any scale and stage of the application development life cycle.
Meeting security needs with auto-scaling
Joulica was founded in Ireland in 2016 with a customer experience optimization solution that complements existing CRM systems. The startup landed on OCI in 2017.
The company has won customers from the Fortune 50 and some of the world’s largest call centers. Meeting that demand — and doing it in the most cost-effective way possible — was never a concern, thanks to the auto-scaling and self-healing capabilities of Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE). When it came time to fully automate the CI/CD pipeline Joulica used to deliver new features and update its production environment, OKE tools eased the migration and ensured security across those DevOps processes.
Supporting big data for “superforecasting”
Complete Intelligence is another startup that leveraged Kubernetes to future-proof their offering. Based in Houston, Texas, the company provides its customers actionable AI forecasting to better automate their finance and business planning operations.
Complete Intelligence quickly assembled a base of multinational customers. Before long, they were tracking billions of data points and making hundreds of millions of calculations daily. With OKE, the core systems designed when the company was in its early stages were able to take on massive data sets for large enterprises and handle the intense computational demands of serving those customers.
Optimizing workloads with serverless
Container technology isn’t the only way to implement cloud native architectures built on open-source software. Especially for event-driven use cases, those that need to run small bits of code when triggered, provisioning any infrastructure, including Kubernetes, can be overkill.
Waste2Go, a startup helping coordinate trash collection in Brazil, found that a serverless solution was the most cost-efficient way to connect the country’s waste producers with waste collectors. Waste2Go deployed Oracle Cloud Functions to execute code that sends data from sensors monitoring waste bins and tanks into its data lake. The serverless architecture works on-demand, meaning the company doesn’t need to pay for idle cloud infrastructure when those waste bins are empty. And because Functions is based on the Fn Project, open-source technology ensures the system’s portability, freeing Waste2Go from fears of lock-in as it grows.
The takeaway
Startups shouldn’t fear the downsides of their own success. Cloud native technology mitigates fears of ill-equipped IT environments that can’t cope with the strains of growth and limits to the path of infrastructure expansion. Cloud native technologies like Kubernetes, serverless, Functions and others transform how young companies develop their applications and architect their mission-critical infrastructure. Startups like those in the Oracle startup program exemplify how to build products to meet the needs of the present while preparing for the possibilities of the future.
Learn more about these modern cloud solutions and the startups using them to scale up.
