Digital transformation is advancing at full speed and the cloud is consolidating its position as the center of operations: its flexibility, its capacity for scale, the ease with which it allows new technologies to be adopted, its ubiquity, its resilience and the possibility it offers of keeping costs under control make it the ideal alternative for running critical workloads.
However, there are some obstacles that, as environments become more complex, have more noticeable effects: legacy systems, often essential to the business, are difficult to migrate and offer less than optimal performance when running on cloud infrastructure. In these cases the architecture team works together with customers to find the best evolution options without affecting the productivity of the IT ecosystems. It is very important to have a consultative team as an assistant to analyze these situations.
The answer to this challenge is the concept of cloud-native platforms. Chosen by the specialized IT market consulting firm, Gartner, as one of the top twelve strategic technologies for 2022. Among its main features, it avoids the traditional application rehosting approach, which generally adds complexity to maintenance, makes upgrading and modernization difficult and does not take advantage of all the benefits that cloud architecture offers.
A cloud-native future
Cloud-native platforms are a key part of accelerating business digital initiatives. The numbers speak for themselves: in 2021, according to Gartner, just 40% of organizations considered these platforms as the basis for their transformation strategies. By 2025, 95% will do so.
This concept is also associated with the concept of cloud native applications: softwares specially designed from the outset to function optimally in this environment, developed in the format of microservices independent of each other and of the corresponding infrastructure and running on dynamic, container-based platforms.
Each microservice fulfills exactly one function, although it has the ability to combine with all the necessary elements to run in the container and deliver the expected functionality. Communication between them is carried out through standardized APIs (application programming interface) that allow the end user to have the feeling of interacting with a single application.
Microservices can be combined and copied into other applications and reused if necessary. Cloud-native platforms provide a mesh of services to manage, coordinate, maintain and scale them.
The importance of DevOps and automation
Containers, meanwhile, are portable and offer a high degree of flexibility to development teams. For example, they allow the functionality of each new service to be tested. Native platforms offer, among their capabilities, container management.
From a strategic point of view, DevOps is particularly important, since in this model the development and operations teams must maintain fluid communication and share agile methodologies to continuously incorporate features to microservices, validating them with users through quickly delivered releases that always focus on the final product.
Another outstanding feature is that NCAs run with a high degree of automation: unlike what happens in applications running in classic server environments, here performance adapts to conditions and needs. In addition, changes and updates can be implemented in real time, without downtimes and allowing users to access the new version transparently.
Finally, they incorporate distributed recovery mechanisms so that service or infrastructure failures do not affect (or affect as little as possible) users.
The cloud came along to help businesses reach their full potential. Cloud-native platforms and applications are now being added so that the cloud can also reach its highest peak.