The downsides of cloud-native solutions | Tech Aza

A current research by Gartner predicts that by 2025 greater than 95% of utility workloads will exist on cloud-native platforms (up from 30% in 2021). I have a tendency to not imagine these sorts of predictions as a result of adoption isn’t linear. We run out of purposes which can be straightforward to transform to new improvement approaches (on this case, cloud native) and thus adoption slows down or ceases a lot sooner than most perceive.

In case you’re nonetheless a bit confused by what the heck “cloud native” means, you’re not alone. Right here’s my greatest clarification: 

Cloud-native improvement is the method of designing, constructing, and working purposes in a cloud computing surroundings. It leverages the advantages, architectural patterns, and capabilities of the cloud to optimize efficiency, scalability, and value effectivity. In different phrases, we deploy every part to offer cloud-like capabilities, regardless of the place it runs, cloud and never.

This method is bought as permitting for sooner time to market, elevated agility and suppleness, and improved scalability and reliability. It’s a basic shift in the way in which software program is developed, deployed, and managed, enabling organizations to take full benefit of the cloud’s capabilities to drive innovation and enterprise progress. Additionally, it really works with common improvement tech equivalent to containers and container orchestration.

Cloud-native utility improvement, whereas providing many advantages, does have its downsides. Most people adopting cloud-native approaches and applied sciences are fast to miss them. Nevertheless, they’re turning into extra obvious as we use the cloud-native approaches to deploy increasingly workloads. Needless to say I’m not arguing towards cloud-native know-how, I’m asserting that we have to think about the downsides in addition to the upsides. So, right here we go.

Vendor lock-in. One of many most important points with cloud-native improvement and deployment is that it might result in vendor lock-in. When an utility is constructed and deployed to a particular cloud supplier, you sometimes use the native capabilities of that cloud supplier. It may be troublesome and expensive to maneuver to a unique supplier or an on-premises platform. This will restrict the flexibleness of the group when it comes to the place they select to run their purposes. It flies within the face of what many imagine to be a core functionality of cloud-native improvement: portability.

A lot of the followers of cloud-native improvement are below the phantasm that lock-in in not a difficulty. You’ll be able to perceive why, provided that cloud native sometimes means utilizing containers, that are supposed to offer portability. The reality is that you simply’ll have to make use of native options on particular cloud suppliers and platforms (storage, safety, and so on.), and doing so limits your potential to maneuver them to different platforms cheaply.

Expertise hole. One other draw back is that cloud-native improvement might be advanced and require a unique set of expertise and instruments in comparison with conventional on-premises and public cloud improvement. This generally is a problem for organizations that aren’t acquainted with cloud-native practices and will require further coaching and sources. 

I typically see poorly designed cloud-native deployments due to this difficulty. In case you’re not expert in constructing and deploying a lot of these techniques, the seemingly outcomes will likely be poorly designed, overly advanced purposes. That received’t assist anyone.

Value overruns. Lastly, organizations could discover that the prices of cloud-native improvement might be unpredictable. Utilization-based pricing can result in surprising prices if an utility experiences a spike in visitors. Organizations have to fastidiously monitor their utilization and plan accordingly, in any other case they might face finances overruns. I might not deploy cloud-native purposes with no sound cloud finops program in place. Many a company is getting $100,000 cloud payments lately once they anticipated $2,000. Whoops!

Cloud-native utility improvement presents many benefits, however organizations ought to concentrate on these potential downsides and plan accordingly to totally understand the advantages of this method. The issue I’m seeing now’s that many enterprises are leveraging cloud-native improvement and deployment with out understanding these downsides. Thus, they cannot handle the dangers accordingly.

If that is your strategic course, you’re joined by many. Be sure you go into cloud-native improvement with each eyes open.