The now unstoppable transition to cloud infrastructure has reached a new stage. When this fundamental change in how digital infrastructure is designed was first adopted, businesses of all types rushed to engage cloud services to host their applications, both new and legacy. The legacy apps were “lifted and shifted” to the cloud from on-premises infrastructure, and businesses found that the initial economic and operational benefits from that made the shift worthwhile. Now, though, IT teams are finding that they need to take a further step and move to cloud-native applications and systems.
This new phase is about much more than taking advantage of cloud economics to improve infrastructure. It’s about building new and improved applications to deliver the flexibility and speed that a modern business requires.
While it may seem that going cloud-native is purely about technology, it is actually driven by a new application design paradigm that aligns with the demands of a digital business. Cloud-native applications are more agile, are easily integrated with each other, have much more automation, and are built on a services model. Cloud-native uses new technology on new infrastructure, whereas cloud-hosted legacy apps were old technology on new infrastructure.
This requires new thinking from both the dev and ops teams. Applications will be built on a service model, where reusable components are integrated to deliver new functionality or capabilities. In this service model, even data is a service, with the creation of a fluid data layer being a key component of cloud-native solutions. These services leverage a container-based approach, where containers provide varied services and are orchestrated in the cloud. Containers supplant the hard-coded legacy approach, making it possible to constantly add to or refine what the larger app provides. This functionality is central to the agility and flexibility that cloud-native delivers. The agile nature of cloud-native has resulted in some development teams moving away from completing massive dev efforts to instead employ an approach that could be called “product management,” where the app is seen as a growing, improving product delivered to the business.
The need to adapt to so many new approaches, processes, and thinking is possibly the most difficult part of transitioning to cloud-native strategies. The inertia that legacy approaches instill, coupled with crippling inability to address technical debt, has stymied many firms. There is also the question of how and where to start the change. Moving to cloud-native can be like stepping into the unknown, and for that reason, many IT teams decide to contract with service providers that have current skills and knowledge for delivering cloud-native solutions. This has many benefits. First, it allows internal teams to more efficiently learn from experts who already have the needed knowledge and the processes to implement it. It also provides faster time to solution for applications that must become cloud-native quickly. A strong service provider can also assist IT management in developing a broad approach to the cloud-native transition that focuses on that organization’s specific needs.
The speed, agility, efficiency, and competitive advantages of going cloud-native are impossible to ignore. In some respects, the only way the speed of IT can match the speed of business is to move away from legacy approaches and become cloud-native. Cloud-native is a new approach to strategic IT that is designed and built to solve current problems, not those of 1999. For information on some of the hot projects focused on cloud-native solutions that Maverick Technology Partners has worked on, please check out: https://www.mavericktechnologypartners.com/resources/projects
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