9 Steps to Cloud-Native Business Transformation
Cloud computing has become an indispensable part of the IT framework. On average, organizations host 46% of their workloads in the cloud, and 95% of them expect to grow their cloud use to 64% of workloads over the next two years.
Cloud computing refers to the on-demand delivery of infrastructure (hardware/servers), storage, databases and all kinds of application services via the internet. Usually, these are delivered by a cloud services platform such as AWS, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure.
Cloud-native, on the other hand, is an architecture for assembling all of the above cloud-based components in a way that is optimized for the cloud environment. It is also an organizational destination: the current goal for enterprises looking to modernize their infrastructure, process and even organizational culture, carefully choosing the cloud technologies that best fit their specific case.
The Value of Cloud-Native
The cloud-native approach empowers enterprises to design their product exclusively around the user, with no concern for the needs of the underlying system. This lets them deliver better products with less risk, which is the true heart of cloud-native. That they also can now deliver them faster and cheaper is a pleasant corollary outcome.
But perhaps most importantly, cloud-native can help reduce risk in a new way: going fast but small, limiting the blast radius in case changes ever go wrong and rolling them back instantly if they do.
How do I Get There?
Achieving a successful cloud-native transformation is a complex process that requires a full organizational transformation. Companies should not only focus on the technology but also on the strategic and cultural changes within an organization.
Naturally, the path to transformation is unique for nearly every organization that sets out on this journey. Below, I present a guide to help companies identify their specific needs and the potential changes they will have to undergo to become cloud-native.
Step One – Culture
Understanding your organizational culture is critical for succeeding as a business. It means being able to choose the path that best fits your organization, and/or not choosing some hot new tech that, however promising, conflicts with your organization’s fundamental nature.
Your culture is the sum of the practices that add up to and define how you function. You can identify these forces that fundamentally shape your organization by examining the actions that define your day-to-day operations. Then you can decide the best next steps.
Step Two – Product/Service Design
This is where you assess just what it is you do and how you go about doing it. Evaluate whether you are organized around long-term planning, delivering a tightly coupled product on a slow and deliberate schedule or whether you iterate rapidly in shorter sprints, ideally using customer feedback to drive the changes.
Step Three – Team Structure
Does your enterprise take a top-down, “Do what the boss says” approach, likely with highly specialized teams? Or one that is more cross-functional, composed of teams where each member has specific skills?
Step Four – Process
Does your business do long-term planning upfront and then follow with execution? Or do you change things responsively and on the fly? Currently, Scrum/Kanban is what we find most enterprises using. Cloud-native and CI/CD, however, require the next jump in speed: developers need to be able to deliver every day and do so independently from other developers.
Step Five – Architecture
Is your enterprise trying “batteries included” to provide everything needed for most use cases? Or perhaps you partition tasks or workloads between service providers which deliver requested resources to the service-seeking clients. The cloud-native goal is to use microservices architecture where a large application is built as a suite of modular components or services.
Step Six – Maintenance
Here, assess how you monitor your systems and keep them running. A “no process/ad hoc” method means every now and then going in to see if the server is up and what the response time is. “Alerting” means having some form of automation to warn when problems arise, but this is nowhere near fast enough for this new world; once a problem is alerted, a human being still needs to intervene. Comprehensive monitoring and full observability, where system behavior is observed and analyzed so problems can be predicted (and prevented) in advance, rather than responded to when they do happen, are an absolute necessity for cloud-native.
Step Seven – Delivery
Delivery is really all about how quickly you can get things out and in how automated a fashion. Traditional major version releases happen every six to 12 months. Transforming to cloud-native grants the ability to release daily, or even multiple times per day.
Step Eight – Provisioning
How do you create new infrastructure and new machines? How quickly can you deploy everything and how automated is this process? Provisioning is where we are happiest to see a company leading the other seven areas.
Step Nine – Infrastructure
Everyone knows how this one goes: single server to multiple servers to VMs running in your own data center. Then, shift to hybrid cloud for a computing environment that mixes on-premises infrastructure with private and/or public cloud services best tailored to your company’s specific needs and use case.
By undergoing these steps, a company generates an intelligent, flexible and constantly updatable status. With this understanding and perspective, companies can begin to plan their cloud-native transition with the knowledge and confidence to avoid common pitfalls along the way.