Amanda Blevins

This past year, I’ve run across several misconceptions that hinder a company’s adoption of cloud. This affects their ability to impact the market in their industry. My blog has been the platform for sharing these barriers with the world. The latest blockage has been around third platform applications or Cloud Native Applications.

For the record, I believe Cloud Native Applications are absolutely the future. Enterprises do need to develop their latest solutions as a CNA. They will be left behind and unable to compete if they do not. If any company provides their solutions as a SaaS not only to their customer base, but also to others in the same industry as a platform for purchase, they will be well positioned to take the lead. However, this applies to one, two, or possibly three applications at most today. What happens to the other hundreds or thousands of platform two or legacy applications left behind?

These applications can still take advantage of many principles of cloud. They can leverage virtualization at all layers, not just for compute. They can run in multiple locations around due to hybrid cloud. Cloud management and monitoring will still apply because of the world that these applications now exist in. Older management and monitoring tools can no longer understand the abstraction the software-defined data center and hybrid cloud introduce. Legacy applications can be packaged and deployed in an automated fashion via the cloud management platform. Platform two applications can also be first class citizens in the hybrid cloud.

While developing cloud native applications and operationalizing the infrastructure team to support this brave new world is a huge task, building a hybrid cloud for the rest is slightly less daunting. The older applications do not need to change operating systems, development platforms, etc. to run in the cloud. The same virtualization technology that allows them to co-exist on physical servers is the foundation of cloud. The software-defined data center is the next step in this evolution. Virtualizing compute, network, and storage lowers the operational touches exponentially when deploying a new system. Enterprises that were previously uncomfortable with virtualization due to the black box nature of the network, can freely run their application on virtual machines with network and security virtualization protecting their applications with full transparency. Also, the security of a system is automated and instantiated when the application is deployed based on pre-determined profiles. Whether this application is running on-premise or in a public cloud, the same rules apply. This results in the same security throughout the hybrid cloud.

The solutions are out there to accomplish this. This isn’t a futures discussion. Adopting this style of operations is still no easy feat. When it comes to the trifecta of people, process, and technology, the first two continue to be the most challenging. However, if they are not equally considered and executed upon, any type of cloud project or IT transformation will not be successful. The incomprehensible dependency map of applications that exists today would only become more complicated by a partially implemented cloud solution. Cloud Native Applications are important for the future, but so are the other thousand running today