While consumer behaviour has changed significantly with the growth of the internet and better broadband/wifi speeds, on the enterprise side of things, change has tended to be a lot slower. While the benefits of using the cloud over traditional, on-premise solutions have been widely accepted in the industry for a long time now, the move towards cloud-native architecture and design is still a medium- long term vision for many enterprises, rather than the reality now.
There is a difference between simply moving your data and applications from a traditional, on-premises solution onto the cloud, versus actually developing your applications natively within the cloud, which brings with it many unique benefits. There is perhaps a need for a better understanding of cloud-native benefits when it comes to many organisations.
In this article, we discuss the many benefits of cloud-native architecture, as well as what organisations must do to make the most of them.
Cloud-native architecture encourages rapid innovation within your organisation
‘The Lean Startup’ movement popularised the importance of ‘getting out the building’, putting your ideas in front of your customers or prospects, getting their feedback and then rapidly iterating on your product, or even ‘pivoting’ and changing course if the feedback suggested that was the best way to go. This philosophy has been well and truly embraced in startup culture and even popular culture thanks to the interest in entrepreneurship spurred on by the internet and social media.
However, on the enterprise side, even those developers that do believe in the lean startup and rapid testing methodology, have often felt restricted due to security and compliance constraints, as well issues with having to put a whole application on hold to make changes to one particular part of it.
However, due to the containerised and microservices functionality of cloud-native development, developers can work on one small part of the whole in a much safer way compared to the old-school, monolith environments, and put their experiments in front of users much, much quicker.
This of course means that they can receive feedback a lot quicker as well, and iterate their way to a much better product that users enjoy and ultimately buy into.
The simple fact that this is possible encourages teams to design apps in a much more flexible way, knowing that rather than trying to get everything perfect, they can release a minimum viable version of their idea out to a test group of users and then iterate from there.
Cloud-native offers easy scalability, both up and down
One of the other traditional barriers to innovation in enterprise environments, apart from security and compliance, is the number of resources required to launch a new application. These resources include servers, IT and dev team time and the time required to have meetings and get buy-in from other stakeholders within the organisation.
With cloud-native development, dev teams know that they can scale the app up and down as required, as they only have to pay for the cloud bandwidth and storage that they actually use, rather than commit to long term contracts.
This flexibility allows them to launch projects a lot quicker than they would have in more- traditional environments. They also have to jump through a lot fewer hoops in terms of getting buy-in from others within the organisation.
All of this again contributes to greater innovation within the organisation as more projects tend to get launched and tested with real users, rather than being discussed in management meetings for months without moving forward.
Cloud-native allows for greater transparency and problem-solving
For large multinationals with dev teams in multiple locations, cloud-native offers a great benefit with the transparency and observability that it allows various dev teams to have. Due to the containerised nature of cloud-native app development, smaller teams can work in an agile way and document their work on individual modules which is much easier to follow for those outside of the core team than a complex, monolithic application that has been developed by just one team with its own communication and documentation methodology.
With cloud-native, it becomes very normal for various teams to collaborate on the same application (while working on individual modules), and this encourages a culture of greater transparency and collaboration, ultimately leading to better results when it comes to the quality of applications.
The above are just some of the many benefits offered by cloud-native application development. However, organisations must ensure that to make the most of these benefits, they create a culture of transparency, collaboration and innovation.
The technology is as useful as you make it, and businesses have a huge opportunity to transform their IT and developmental workflows by going cloud-native.
