New technologies help companies to transform organizations into digital organizations. Identifying the emerging cloud technologies and understanding their impact on the existing cloud landscape can help companies to become more successful.
While some companies do not have a formal cloud strategy in place, most companies are using at least a cloud technology such as SaaS, IaaS or PaaS – whether in a private, public or hybrid cloud.
Other companies follow a multi cloud strategy since it allows them to select different cloud services from different providers because some are better for certain tasks than others. For example, some cloud platforms specialize in large data transfers or have integrated machine learning capabilities.
Most popular cloud models are the hybrid and multi cloud as of today. Seeing the first benefits of cost savings and increased efficiencies, companies focus now more on agility, speed and time to market to enable digital business success.
The new cloud capabilities increase the deployment options. Companies want the benefits of the cloud in all of their IT systems with the increased offering of cloud service providers, customers can now decide on the technology, services, providers, locations, form factors and control.
Since the digitalization journey raises new considerations and expectations, companies are now looking into technical areas to improve their cloud landscape such as the distributed cloud, API-Centric SaaS, Cloudlets, Blockchain PaaS, Cloud Native, Site Reliability Engineering, Containers, Edge Computing and Service Mesh.
Cloud Native
Cloud Native is about designing modern applications that embrace rapid change, large scale, and resilience, in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds. Containers, service meshes, micro services, 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 effort.
Challenges
Applications have become increasingly complex with users demanding more functionality and response time. Users expect rapid responsiveness, innovative features, and zero downtime. Performance problems, recurring errors, and the inability to move fast are no longer acceptable.
Companies are now looking more at cloud native concepts and to get the most out of the cloud instead of lift and shift migrations.
Benefits
Cloud Native is much about speed and agility. Business systems are evolving from enabling business capabilities to weapons of strategic transformation, accelerating business velocity and growth. It’s imperative to get ideas to market immediately.
Examples
Companies such as Netflix, Uber and WeChat deploy hundreds of services in production on a weekly basis and achieve speed, agility, and scalability using Cloud Native technologies.
Since the Cloud Native approach is provisioning each instance as a virtual machine or container, you do not have a lump risk of a single server downtime.
Cloud service provider platforms support this type of highly elastic infrastructure with automatic scaling, self-healing, and monitoring capabilities.
Conclusion
Without a paradigm shift in the IT departments, which includes not only technical aspects, the path for companies to Cloud Native IT will hardly be possible.
Among the major hurdles are legacy systems, which still control the core processes in many companies. Cloud Native is not about simply moving legacy applications unchanged into the cloud using the Lift & Shift method. The alternatives before a cloud migration are modernization or replacement or new development. The solution is usually integration into a hybrid IT such as both on premises systems and Cloud Native components.
Companies want to deploy and operate in a way that fully leverages native cloud potentials.