Answer Honestly: Are you Ersatz Cloud Native?

As we approach the middle of the year, I’ve been in the full-on strategic planning mode the last couple of weeks and cloud native is a major focus for me! As part of this, I was looking at industry trends and a particular type of organisation caught my eye.

Most organisations often aspire to increase agility, to respond quicker to their customers and market demands, to innovate. However, many organisations have years of technical debt, monolithic application stacks and shrinking IT budgets. IT is still too often seen as a cost centre instead of an opportunity to become a profit centre and agent for growth.

These organisations have one thing in common; they see lifting and shifting to the cloud as the silver bullet.

I thought Cloud was the silver bullet?

Now don’t get me wrong, cloud is AWESOME! It does help to address some of the challenges identified, but anyone who has been working in this space for any length of time will tell you cloud is an enabler, not the solution.

Moving your workloads to cloud is like moving your business from your garage to a shiny new workshop, with an array of amazing tools hanging on the wall just begging to help you with your next project.

You have room to breathe, so your innovation is now limited by your imagination, far more than your square footage! If you come up with an idea that turns out quickly to be garbage, there’s a handy industrial skip out the back, meaning you don’t have to wait 2 weeks until the next grey bin day to get rid of it!

Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s a free-for-all! You still need to understand the tools, how they work to achieve outcomes faster and what problems they solve, lest you accidently lop off a finger!

Sounds great! Am I Cloud Native now then?

Here’s the key – unless we re-evaluate everything we do today and adopt new ways of working, we are simply not going to realise the benefit of working out of our shiny new workshop, with our huge array of tools!

In the real world this means your entire process from whiteboard ideation to deployment, the ongoing lifecycle of applications and everything / everyone / every process that touches them!

To me, cloud native means a set of technologies, the methodologies and processes to manage them and a state of mind which needs to permeate an organisation!

If you’ve simply lifted and shifted your existing estate and dropped it into the cloud, you’re not cloud native, you’re simply running VMs in a different data centre.

Much like the famed elevator from Lemony Snicket, VMs in the cloud are simply playing at being Cloud, or more accurately, Ersatz Cloud Native.

Further Reading:

I wrote another brief post on cloud native considerations a while back:
The Complexity of Public Cloud Architecture

Architecture, Cloud , , , , , ,