GOING CLOUD-NATIVE

STEPS FOR MAKING A SUCCESSFUL TRANSITION TO CLOUD-NATIVE APPS.

Ayman Al Shaikh

Cloud-native refers to a modern approach to developing and running software applications, taking advantage of the dynamic nature of cloud computing.

Cloud-native entails various techniques and tools, and according to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure, and declarative APIs exemplify this approach.

IDC says organisations adopting cloudnative development need to implement platform as a service, cultivate developer familiarity with cloud-native technologies, deepen their adoption of DevOps, and create a developer-centric culture within their organisation.

What are the top cloud-native trends to watch out for in 2022?

“By leveraging cloud-native architectures to build and run applications, organisations can bring ideas from the drawing-board to production faster and accordingly, respond to customer needs more quickly,” says Kapil Arora, MultiPractice Leader, Kyndryl Middle East & Africa.

As businesses adopted more virtual ways of working and delivery of digital services due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for shifting workloads to the cloud to leverage the resiliency and

Most organisations are at some point on their digital transformation journey and cloud-native computing will play a part in that, says Ayman Al Shaikh, Director, CEMEA Customer Success Leader, Red Hat.

He says as enterprises build more AI applications, they will want to connect this with their cloud-native computing. “Organisations are maturing on their cloud-native development journey and starting to onboard most of their applications into container platforms or develop their new applications as microservices in a cloud-native environment.”

Khaled AlShami, Infor’s vice president for solution consulting in MEA, says another important trend we are likely to see is further specialisation of cloudbased solutions. “As more organisations from different sectors explore the advantages of the cloud, we will see a greater need for differentiation and specialisation of cloud services. This is perhaps not surprising – different industries have very different ICT needs, and this applies to the cloud too.”

Cloud-native vs. on-prem architectures

Going cloud-native has many distinct advantages over traditional application development models.

When it comes to applications, a cloud-native platform provides automated scalability, faster deployment time, right-sized capacity, improved reliability, and rapid recovery times through self-healing at a significantly lower cost of setting up and managing the underlying IT infrastructure.

“Additionally, cloud-native platforms have greater level of flexibility compared to that of a traditional platform which relies heavily on physical servers. Necessary scalability on cloud-native apps is achieved by breaking down its functions into microservices which eventually allows better management of individual service,” says Arora.

Cloud-native apps are also cloud agnostic which enables them to

Kapil Arora

WHEN IT COMES TO APPLICATIONS, A CLOUDNATIVE PLATFORM PROVIDES AUTOMATED SCALABILITY, FASTER DEPLOYMENT TIME, RIGHT-SIZED CAPACITY, IMPROVED RELIABILITY, AND RAPID RECOVERY TIMES THROUGH SELF-HEALING AT A SIGNIFICANTLY LOWER COST OF SETTING UP AND MANAGING THE UNDERLYING IT INFRASTRUCTURE.

global accessibility it has to offer has also increased. It will continue to grow in 2022 and over the years. Further, cloud computing continues to advance greatly and evolve with exciting new use cases aiming to solve newer business problems. Hence, we’ll continue to see the rapid increase in cloud adoption also involving modernisation of applications towards more of a cloud-native platform, he says.

Khaled AlShami

run in a highly distributed manner, maintaining independence while allocating resources based on the application needs.

According to Arora, deployment Deployment is rapid and provides organisations with greater agility, resilience, and portability across cloud environments. This enables organisations to benefit from improved development-to-production cycle times, compared to traditional onprem architecture, which is relatively less flexible and requires greater investments in both CapEx towards the physical servers and skills to develop and manage.

To get the most out of the cloud, applications should be cloud-native, says Al Shaikh from Red Hat. “However, most large enterprises have a legacy application backlog, so the question for them is how to modernise and integrate the new with the old. Many large enterprises struggle with DevOps, which inhibits their ability to become cloud-native. The solution is tools that are simpler to use and easier paths to becoming cloud-native, such as using container platforms.”

AlShami from Infor adds that cloudnative provides true agility, making it easier for organisations to quickly set up new divisions or branches, break off business units, or merge with partners.

Paulo Pereira

DEPENDING UPON THE SERVICES OR NATIVE APIS THAT ONE CONSUMES FROM A CLOUD PROVIDER, THERE COULD BE AN INCREASE OF THREATS DUE TO BECOMING TOO DEPENDENT ON A PARTICULAR CLOUD PROVIDER OR A SERVICE THAT IS NATIVE TO THAT CLOUD ITSELF.

Cloud solutions also give business users tools to help them do their job, often from any place, anytime. In addition, remote connectivity is simplified – without risking security.

The key challenges

Cloud-native apps are inherently more complex, and enterprises looking to embrace this model need to avoid some common pitfalls and understand the requirements.

“Considering its advantages and amidst the enthusiasm of going cloudnative, the challenges can easily get overlooked especially when one migrates from monolithic, legacy applications set to a cloud-native strategy. Therefore, early identification and addressing them during the cloudnative adoption and migration strategy is key to overcome such challenges,” says Arora from Kyndryl.

Some of the key challenges that might arise when cloud-native technologies are used include:

Security and observability – cloudnative applications are typically decomposed into individual microservices and this decomposition of business logic results in a rather complex distributed system. Additionally, these microservices need to communicate with each other over a network for the application to function. This whole ecosystem makes cloud-native applications to be inherently more complex. It makes them rather harder to secure considering there are more logical pieces to protect. It also makes it harder to monitor because guaranteeing application health also requires monitoring relationships between the services, not just the services themselves.

Cloud hyperscaler lock-in: Depending upon the services or native APIs that one consumes from a cloud provider, there could be an increase of threats due to becoming too dependent on a particular cloud provider or a service that is native to that cloud itself.

Paulo Pereira, Senior Director, Systems Engineering – Emerging Markets at Nutanix, sums up: “The secret to making a cloud initiative successful is to make sure that the technology stack is based on the same fundamental design principles which allow the free movement of workloads between private and public clouds. Any approach which undermines a path to easily return the workload on-prem or into a different cloud is guaranteed to cause problems during the migration and in the future.”