Cloud Native: Organizational Considerations
Besides the technical and runtime aspects from posts one and two, there are also some organizational ideas that play a role in the Cloud Native universe.
DevOps Culture
Developers and operations teams should work closely together, emphasizing shared responsibility and continuous improvement. The DevOps concept is also often implemented in the context of a single team. True to the motto “You build it, you run it”, the responsibility for operating your own software then lies with the development team, which has advantages (fewer communication hurdles, therefore more efficient) and disadvantages (more responsibility, high learning curve and less focus on business value).
The already long-term known pattern of Continuous Integration & Deployment (CI/CD) helps to be efficient and safe. Automated pipelines are used to test, integrate, and deploy code changes quickly and reliably. But the CI/CD automation does not stop at software development level. It can also be applied to infrastructure management and provisioning through code. This concept is called Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and has similarities with GitOps approach, making the infrastructure setup also version-controlled and repeatable. Tools supporting these processes are for instance Ansible, AWX and Hashicorp Terraform.
The latest movement to be mentioned in this area is the concept of Platform Engineering. Its core idea is to relieve the development teams of operational overheads, but not getting back to the early days of a strict separation of development and operations teams. Hence, the goal is to provide an individual platform by a dedicated engineering team as a product to enable the whole development cycle including:
- CI/CD System
- Provision infrastructure as needed (self-servicing capabilities)
- Monitor the owned software stack
- Support with corporate standards about documentation, project templates, etc. (developer portal)
Continuous Improvement
Finally, the agile approach of having frequent feedback loops is going to help the teams to become stronger, which in the end will improve the created software and runtime system. Being agile in this sense also brings the ability to quickly adapt to changing requirements and environments through iterative development and deployment. By adhering to these principles, organizations can create robust, scalable, and efficient applications that leverage the full power of the cloud.
Summary
We touched on many topics around the concepts and ideas of Cloud Native and showed that it is not only a technological paradigm. Hence cultural and organizational practices also have influence on providing software solutions in a modern distributed way. Not all concepts are mandatory to convert your system to Cloud Native, but the more points you consider, the more value you can extract from a strategic reorientation. For example:
- Faster Time to Market
- Scalability and Flexibility
- Improved Resilience and Reliability
- Cost Efficiency
Innovation and Competitiveness
The technical parts from above gave just an overview and showed what topics should be in focus. There is no need to implement everything on your own. Instead, for many aspects a broad variety of concrete third party tools exists to support. If you want to get an overview you can have a look at the CNCF landscape website of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
CID has many years of experience in the Cloud Native area regarding tools, software architecture, workflow patterns and strategy planning. You need support? Don’t hesitate to contact us.
Author © 2024: Marcel Hoyer – www.linkedin.com/in/marcel-hoyer-0a21a12b2/
