Why should you care about Cloud Native?

In times when developer efficiency and speed to market is everything it’s only natural for organisations to turn to technology to find the solution. 

One of the most effective solutions is through building and running scalable applications in public, private and hybrid clouds. This allows for systems to be resilient, manageable and observable. Combined with robust automation, they allow engineers to make high-impact changes frequently and predictably with minimal toil. That’s being cloud native. Although a factor, where the applications run is not as important as how they run.

There is great effort in the industry to move to become more cloud native by implementing agile techniques and leveraging containers and Kubernetes. The following questionnaire will allow you to benchmark where your organisation is against cloud native best practices and highlight areas for improvement.

The questions below should give us a good indication of where your organisation is in its cloud native journey and steps to take to improve your cloud native posture.

Please select the box that best describes your current status.

Things to consider to improve your organisation's cloud-native maturity:

• Try to create a culture of learning through experimentation. Understanding the failing is fine as long as you learn from it as early as possible. Empower teams to make their own decisions where possible.
• Use user research to help your teams understand what matters to your customers
• Identify data sources within your organisation that will help you improve the service to your customers
• Aggregate data points and sources into dashboard showing meaningful insights, performance indicators and considering sharing this across the organisation and to enable your teams to have common objectives and goals to work towards

Things to consider to improve your team and projects cloud-native maturity:

• Using agile methodologies to empower your teams through iterative change
• Using design thinking approaches that simplify the problem further by re-framing the problem in human-centric way and creating many ideas in brainstorming sessions, adopting a hands-on approach in prototyping and experimenting.
• Put a process in place to make changes as seamless as possible, enabling you to make tiny changes constantly.
• Create and empower product teams to build and run their service, so they get a full understanding of the user needs and the challenges in production so that they are motivated to improve both.

Things to consider to improve your the way you use technology in order to reach cloud-native maturity:

• Using 12 factor application methodology to move to a microservice based architecture. Read more about 12 factor applications here: https://12factor.net/
• Using a consistent interface across any cloud with a PaaS solution will allow you to be cloud agnostic and reap the benefits of a multi-cloud, picking the right solution for the job.
• Using immutable infrastructure will ensure consistency and reliability, as well as simplicity in deployment.
• Having fully automated deployment and testing cycles means that the human effort in promoting your application into production doesn't grow as your development increases, its key to reliability and ensuring your team is scalable (ie can manage a great number of services with the same number of people)
• Full observability means you can answer any questions about what’s happening on the inside of the system just by observing the outside of the system, without having to ship new code to answer new questions. Try instrumenting your code for observability by creating events for all “hops” and gathering as much context around these as possible.
• Using metrics to understand when your application needs to scale up or down can enable you to dramatically reduce your cloud spend, and improve your user satisfaction.