Sheldon Anthony IO

The move toward cloud-native isn’t often as simple as unplugging from old processes and plugging into the new. Your organization must learn to navigate the new terrain to maximize digital opportunities. With so many early adopters lifting and shifting their existing systems to cloud-native platforms, they have been burdened with skyrocketing operational costs. So before lifting and shifting your existing monolith architecture into cloud-native platforms, we want you to take into account these key considerations.

1. Understand the business value

   It is more than just a technological exercise to move towards cloud-native platforms. There needs to be a connection between business outcomes and specific objectives that the company wants to address. A cloud-native platform is a great fit for some apps, such as those with variable loads, public-facing, or planned for modernization in the near term. However, others will not provide you with a return on your investment due to the difficulty or risk of migrating. It's best to start the process by discussing what you want migrating to cloud-native platforms to accomplish. Focusing on the results that you are looking for, both in terms of customer experience and internal efficiency.

2. Adopt a DevOps culture

   There remains a significant challenge in almost every industry in identifying an optimal method of enabling coordination and rapid delivery of assistance to consumers without compromising quality. By using DevOps to implement CI/CD, you streamline the development pipeline, resulting in faster and more efficient development. The scalability and availability of the cloud-native platforms can be better utilized in this way. By considering the value of adopting a DevOps culture, businesses can reap the benefits of faster, more accurate coordination and delivery of service. Ultimately, that's the power of a well-executed DevOps culture—and it just might be what you need to take your business to the next level.

3. Make security a priority from the start

   You can reach a broader audience with cloud-native applications, which makes you more vulnerable to security threats. Implementing policies and procedures before you begin development is crucial to begin the security discussion early. Organizations must implement specific practices around their users' data to comply with new regulatory requirements, such as the GDPR in the EU. Rather than retrofitting these requirements after a project is complete, it is easier to implement them at the beginning. According to Accenture, 65% of companies were identified as risk and compliance candidates in migrating to cloud platforms.^[1] The cloud-native revolution is still relatively young, and we will likely continue to find new best practices surrounding it. As such, any organization considering a switch to a cloud-native platform should make security a top priority.

4. Improve visibility through end-to-end monitoring

   As architectural complexity increases, it has become increasingly difficult to detect and diagnose application performance problems. The workloads and the application infrastructure must be fully and granularly documented in a hyper-scale environment so that you can effectively troubleshoot microservices-based applications. Cloud-native applications today span multiple microservices, which makes it challenging to detect issues and reach the root cause of a performance problem. We want our cloud-native platform applications to be fast but also reliable. To get there, we need visibility into the end-to-end performance monitoring across all stages of the stack. The more granular this information is, the better we can tune service performance and be proactive with problem diagnosis and resolution.

Overall, the transition to cloud-native platforms requires most organizations to learn a great deal. Migrating from on-premises applications to cloud-native platforms requires a diverse set of individuals from across an organization. In addition, an organization’s ability to adopt and adapt methods to stay competitive through omnichannel digital experiences will differ based on customer needs and changing technology. A company’s unique capabilities also determine how quickly it can adapt its operations.