Native cloud means that a digital business objective has been architected by applications and services that run natively in the cloud. There’s no on-premises footprint of legacy systems that must be maintained and upgraded to meet increasing demand. Everything is deployed and scales in an elastic environment. The more resources you need, the more the environment grows automatically or with guidance. When there’s less need, the environment in turn scales back.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)—one of the big three public cloud providers along with Microsoft Azure (MS Azure) and Google Cloud Compute (GCP)—describes its cloud services specifically by using the term elastic in offerings such as Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) or Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2).
This architecture allows for a continuous integration, continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline of software code that keeps the resulting digital business objective responsive to a fast-moving market need. Apps for Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb are notable examples of businesses that have used a cloud-native approach from their inception. Referencing these companies using the term “from the ground up” is no longer appropriate. From the cloud up? That could work.
Harnessing a Native Cloud Strategy for Enterprises
Pervasive apps for ride sharing, hotel stays, or online food delivery typically run using a cloud-native strategy from one primary public cloud provider. However, the reality is that most larger enterprises have a complex mix of resources running on-premises and in both private and public cloud environments.
According to this post from 452 Research, enterprises will now have 60% of their workloads in the public cloud, as they show in this graphic prediction from 2017:
In 2019, our current year, we might find that cloud adoption might not have grown as expected. We will have to stay tuned for that. There are a number of factors that could be halting public cloud adoption at the rate we once expected.
Any way you look at it, an ambitious interpretation of 60% in the cloud, still leaves plenty of workloads on premises.
What’s keeping these enterprises from moving to the cloud? Complexity.
Enterprise customers have been struggling with a sprawl of resources available from multiple on-premises, private, and public cloud environments as well as the associated complexity of managing all of that without adequate visibility and control. They have enabled cloud-native solutions for some of their initiatives by allowing some of their teams to go “all in” on public cloud only to find that they’re spending a lot more than they had anticipated.
Some enterprise IT departments are having to “repatriate” some workloads back on-premises because the cloud-native spend did not outweigh the benefits of a scalable CI/CD approach. For more information about cloud adoption and trends, see 2019 Cloud Predictions from the APMdigest.
We’re still convinced at CloudBolt that being able to adopt a native cloud approach as an enterprise can be done effectively. A cloud management platform can provide for the scalability and agility of cloud-native solutions for the CI/CD pipeline coupled with the ability to keep an eye on spending and unnecessary overprovisioning of resources. The development and DevOps teams with the public cloud expertise can team up with IT and even the security teams to develop controlled workflows in the public cloud that can have automated checks to make sure spending is throttled when necessary and the inventory of resources running is a right fit for the objective.
CloudBolt and Harnessing Cloud Native
At CloudBolt, we’ve adopted this approach to help with visibility and control of native cloud along with all the other initiatives:
- Single platform connected to multiple cloud and on-premises resources
- Secure role-based access to approved configuration and provisioning
- Safeguarded to prevent overspending on runaway IT resources
- Standardized templates for automation and extensibility to DevOps processes
We’ve partnered with all three major public cloud providers to support cloud-native as well as any hybrid cloud or multi-cloud objective.
