In order to understand what cloud native is, let’s review how was have reached where we are.

Pre-Cloud era

  • Development:   It took months and years to develop software using a waterfall approach. Releases for new features were infrequent. Development, quality assurance, and operations were operating in silos.
  • Infrastructure: Physical hardware was located on-premise or co-located in data center, and as server virtualization become mainstream, virtual servers were deployed to consolidate operations on fewer, larger physical servers.
  • Operations: Operational tasks were mostly manual, limiting the scale at which systems could operate. Over time, configuration management tools helped making provisioning and maintaining the physical and virtual infrastructure less onerous.

Cloud-Era

  • Development: Quality and Speed of development increased significant with adoption of Agile development and DevOps approaches as in alternative to waterfall approach.
  • Infrastructure: Resources to run Applications become available in the public cloud as a service. Organizations embraced the cloud as a way to focus on their core business and offload portions of their IT infrastructure, paying only for the resources consumed.
  • Operations: Automation became more prevalent for cloud operations and management, including provisioning, configuration, scaling, and self-healing.

Cloud-Native era

  • Development: Application monoliths are being replaced with new software architectures such as microservices and serverless functions. Virtualization had advanced to containerization. Applications are taking advantage of the key characteristics of cloud computing.
  • Infrastructure: Platforms are available as a service in the cloud. Organizations often adopt a multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud approach, deploying applications and services wherever it makes the most sense to run them.
  • Operations: Software running on distributed systems is enabled by new deployment methods such as containers and container orchestration platforms. Increased abstraction in applications and infrastructure means developers approach system health and performance in new ways, taking advantage of improvements while grappling with increased complexity.

This progression toward the cloud native era highlights the fact that a simple migration or “lift and shift” of applications to the cloud is not enough to exploit the true benefits of the cloud.

While there is no single, standardized statement that explains what cloud native means, the essence of the term and how it is used is this: Cloud native is about optimizing applications and their environments to take maximum advantage of the core characteristics of cloud computing with the goal of achieving transformational digital and business outcomes. Applications that are built to run in cloud environments are:

  • Designed for and deployed to distributed computing resources to leverage economies of scale
  • Elastic; that is, they respond dynamically to changes in workload
  • Easy to deploy and manage on demand because management of the underlying platform and infrastructure has been abstracted away
  • Resilient against failure

At the end of the day, cloud native is important because it enables organizations to achieve transformational digital and business outcomes by taking full advantage of the myriad benefits of the cloud. A well-executed cloud native strategy lets you move faster and deliver greater value by:

  • Improving customer experiences and fostering loyalty
  • Creating competitive advantage through increased agility and faster time-to-market
  • Disrupting the industry by enabling new business models
  • Reducing costs through increased operating efficiency
  • Driving higher profits by increasing customer value and creating new revenue streams

SQLSquare offers consulting services helping you with your Cloud-Native transformation journey. Our Services include: