Cloud-native applications fully utilize the operational paradigm of the cloud, generating business value through auto-provisioning, scalability, and redundancy.
By disassembling monolithic applications into containers that are distinct but interconnected, developers create applications that are able to easily expand in response to market demand.
In its most basic form, cloud-native computing enables code development and deployment in any cloud environment, including private, hybrid, and public ones.
There are approximately 11.2 million cloud-native developers, according to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), and the use of cloud-native architecture is constantly growing.
Even though cloud-native computing sounds great in theory, implementing it isn’t always easy or quick, especially if your company uses old apps.
In the cloud native market, there are so many competing platforms and technologies that overlap and compete with one another that it is simple to become overwhelmed.
Cloud-native products that are tailored to your specific requirements must be implemented as well as encouraged through cultural shifts. Reforms and changes should be implemented gradually but thoroughly.
Ten of the most common issues that businesses encounter when switching to a cloud-native infrastructure are listed below.
How does Cloud-Native work?
Let’s take a quick look at the cloud-native infrastructure before getting into the difficulties that come with using it.
The term “cloud-native” refers to the idea of developing and implementing applications that make use of the remote computing capabilities provided by the cloud delivery paradigm.
Cloud Native Applications are designed to make use of the size, scalability, resilience, and adaptability of the cloud.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) claims that cloud-native technology enables the creation and operation of scalable applications on public, private, and hybrid clouds.
Containers (itcompanies dot net, benefits of containerization), service meshes, microservices, stateless infrastructure, and unambiguous application programming interfaces (APIs) are the best examples of this strategy.
System visibility, controllability, and robustness are all made possible by these properties.
They make it possible for engineers to frequently and quickly make significant changes.
By 2025, cloud-native platforms will host over 95% of the most recent technological workloads, up from 30% in 2021, according to a Gartner study.
- 1. The Top Ten Obstacles Businesses Face When Switching to a Cloud-Native Infrastructure Inefficiencies become a big deal when teams use a utility model for payment. Teams may be used to using utility pricing for both physical and virtual servers they have purchased, but this is not the case with cloud-native infrastructure.
The addition of costs associated with cloud-native design necessitates an effective utility-style pricing model. The amount used determines the price, which varies.
Physical or virtual computers, on-premises installations, and more conventionally moved designs are examples of scaled sunk costs.
As a result, one upgrade option is to use server less functions in its place.
However, server less services alone may cost more in cloud-native systems if they are not accurately identified.
High storage, high concurrency, and lengthy functions can significantly increase costs if your operation is scaled out. To avoid unexpected costs, cloud-native infrastructure must identify wasteful cloud resources.
- 2. When you use hosted or on-premises servers, you deal with temporary components and mutable microservices. You have a predetermined and limited pool of computing resources. Contrarily, cloud-native microservices are primarily on-demand, number- and durability-adjustable, frequently unstructured, and transient, lasting only as long as needed.
If a microservice has changed or stopped working, it can be hard to figure out what went wrong in the past.
- 3. A lack of knowledge and understanding on the part of the user is a major barrier to moving to cloud-native infrastructure. There is a great deal of confusion as a result of your ignorance of the infrastructure management procedure.
Before learning more about the infrastructure, it’s important to understand the source services. You need a solution for observability that can help you find the source services.
Additionally, the observability platform will assist you in identifying any issues. Even if the issues are with cloud-based infrastructure but not under your administrative supervision, the observability solution will identify them.
By looking at your entire system, you can get visibility from cloud provider monitoring services; This makes it easier to figure out what’s wrong.
- 4. We don’t think about security on a daily basis, but when a significant incident occurs, it becomes clear how important it is to keep it up. Security becomes both more important and more difficult.
Lack of awareness and accessibility, both of which were mentioned in the previous challenge, become significantly more problematic in terms of security. Because it is difficult to observe everything, you can overlook significant security concerns.
When there is a lot of security data to look at, the cost of analysis and investigation goes up. On cloud-native infrastructure, you must decide which data is valuable.
In systems that make use of numerous technologies, hybrid clouds, and clouds, it is challenging to impose uniform regulations. Attacks can occur on a cloud infrastructure that has been constructed incorrectly.
You must also be able to react quickly.
Cloud security is just as hard and hard to understand as traditional apps. Being alert to potential dangers is essential.
By ensuring the safety of their cloud-based IP security cameras (avigilon), businesses must implement robust security measures. As cybercriminals expand their attack surface and discover new infrastructure vulnerabilities, this can assist in protecting every part of their network from cybercrime.
- 5. Problem with Service Integration A lot of cloud-native applications are built from a lot of different services. Due to their dynamic nature, they are more adaptable and scalable than monoliths.
However, it also implies that cloud-native workloads must successfully integrate a significant number of additional moving parts.
The problem of service integration must be partially addressed by developers working on cloud-native applications.
Instead of attempting to make a single service do multiple things, it is smart to build a separate service for each kind of operation within a workload.
They need to double check that each service source is scaled appropriately. In addition, it is essential to avoid including additional services simply because you can. If a new service adds more complexity to your program, check and make sure that the service serves a specific purpose.
In addition to the application’s core design, selecting the appropriate distribution methods is essential for successful service integration. Probably using containers is the most logical way to deploy many services and combine them into a single task. In other circumstances, however, server less functions or non-containerized programs coupled via APIs may be preferable.
- 6. Building Cloud-Native Apps Using Delivery Pipelines Cloud-native apps run online. Regardless of whether your company uses a private, public, on-premises, or hybrid cloud, the term “the cloud” refers to unchangeable architecture and cloud management practices.
However, many application delivery pipelines are still based on traditional on-premises settings that have not been cloud-ified or are inefficient when combined with containers-based programs and services or public cloud environments.
There are numerous challenges posed by this. One is the possibility of delays when transferring code to an on-premises system from a local or private environment. Another factor is the difficulty of simulating production settings when creating and analyzing locally, which could lead to unpredictability in the application’s behavior after deployment.
Relocating your CI/CD pipeline to a cloud-based system is one of the most effective strategies for overcoming these challenges. While simulating the production system and bringing your pipeline as close as possible to your applications, this will enable you to take advantage of the cloud’s scalability, infallible infrastructure, and other benefits.
This expedites distribution by developing the code closer to the deployment location. In addition, it becomes easier to create test environments that are identical to those in the real world.
Some programmers prefer the convenience and efficiency of local IDEs over cloud-based ones, so a production system that is entirely cloud-based is not for everyone.
However, make every effort to ensure that your CI/CD pipelines are as effective as possible in a cloud environment.
- 7. Both organizational transformation and teams comprised of appropriately skilled personnel are required: When dealing with cloud-native infrastructure, businesses and other organizations discover that their teams’ DevOps approach and culture must shift to CI/CD pipelines. If this is not the case, it becomes a problem. As they transform their workplace culture, teams will require special abilities and skills.
When there are interruptions in a cloud-native system, each team member must fully participate. Teams will be required to develop cloud architect skills.
Apps that use public cloud services, containers, Kubernetes, and microservices, as well as those that design and develop them, require specialized knowledge.
A culture that is focused on observability easily accommodates the cultural shift that is required for cloud-native architecture. When micro-failures are anticipated and promptly handled, observability is required by everyone, including the operations and research teams.
For both development and operations engineers, performance metrics like Apdex, average response time, error rates, and throughput are crucial.
Through observability, you can quickly respond to these failures and undesirable circumstances. You get the ability to move faster.
- 8. Reliability Issues Are Intertwined with Cloud-Native Design To Avoid Reliability Issues, You Must Use Cloud Platforms and Their Capabilities Properly Even When Using A Cloud When certain groups utilize multiple environments, achieving reliability can be challenging and costly.
Within a single cloud, you should be able to track your dependability or reliability. Then, to see if your strategies are working, you can keep an eye on stability and performance metrics like the page’s slow load time.
Designing for dependability alone is not sufficient; You must also be able to monitor performance and reliability from the front-end user interface to the backend web infrastructure.
Reliability can manifest in a variety of ways. You might not be aware of the dangers you face frequently. As a result, you can’t choose a massively scalable architecture without keeping an eye on the situation.
To see where your reliability makes money, you need an observability tool.
- 9. Problems with Management and Control The more services running in an application, the more difficult it is to manage and control them. This is true regardless of how many operations need to be tracked.
In addition, it is necessary to observe interactions between services in addition to the systems or services themselves in order to preserve an application’s stability and functionality.
As a result, a strategy that can anticipate how errors in one service will affect others and identify the most critical issues is required to effectively track and control operations in a cloud-native system. Because it replaces static criteria with ones that continuously evaluate application environments to determine what is acceptable and what is not, dynamic baselining is also criticized.
- 10. Service Provider Lock-in and Limited Room for Expansion Vendor lock-in can now occur if you have previously made a significant commitment to a technology or system.
However, in general, cloud provider platforms are feature-rich and simple to use. However, there is frequently a lock-in penalty attached to them.
In the end, cloud-native computing means that you can use cloud providers that are extremely scalable while still having the option to take into account hybrid and multifaceted cloud infrastructures.
Conclusion According to a Statista study, the re-architecture of proprietary solutions into microservices will be the most common cloud-native use case in enterprises worldwide by 2022, with approximately 19% of those polled suggesting this.
Application deployment and testing came in second place among the participants’ preferred use cases.
However, regardless of your perspective, adjusting to the cloud can be challenging. Compared to conventional application systems, cloud-native applications are more complicated and contain many more potential points of failure.
In order to achieve the responsiveness, dependability, and scalability that cloud-native systems can only offer, it is necessary to solve the issues that cloud-native computing presents.
