What's the latest big thing for businesses trying to get the best out of their IT spending and capabilities in a Covid-impacted world? It's called Cloud Native and, as Don Christie writes, it's as revolutionary as Toyota's 'just in time' manufacturing idea. (Partner Content)
Cloud computing has unquestionably been the latest leap forward in IT. The convenience, and power, of being able to outsource your workloads and storage to cloud providers has enabled countless businesses to be able to focus on their core mission, which in most cases is not running their own infrastructure.
Cloud Native is the next, natural step: Building and running your applications in a way that optimises them for the cloud computing model. Just as Toyota revolutionised supply chain management to drive efficiencies, organisations are now ensuring their IT systems are lean, stable, and much more readily adaptable to rapid change.
The nuts and bolts of this approach revolve around using containers, end-to-end automation, scaling, cloud agnosticism, high-availability, and continuous integration and deployments. Together, these approaches will help New Zealand businesses drive down their costs, improve their responsiveness, and enhance their overall security and compliance profiles.
As we continue to navigate our way through the volatility of a Covid-impacted world, the ability to more rapidly respond to opportunities in the market is critical. You want to drive down your infrastructure costs? Need to quickly deploy new features for your application? Want rapid feedback on A/B testing your new site? Looking to upskill your team? Cloud Native supports this sort of agility and responsiveness.
This isn’t a simple transformation. Any more than retooling your production line like Toyota did for “just in time” supplies. Like any step in business transformation, it takes planning and preparation. Start with an assessment of your current state: have you moved some, or most of your workloads to the cloud? Have you capitalised on the gains you expected, either in terms of cost reductions or greater flexibility? Is your workforce capability where it needs to be to begin this move?
Organisations we have worked with were at all points along this spectrum. Each, however, has, with some vision and commitment, been able to move forward and take advantage of some, or all, of the aspects of a Cloud Native approach to their IT.
The Department of Internal Affairs’ Life Events platform, that hosts joined-up government services like the innovative Smart Start for expectant parents and caregivers, uses many of these tools. Automated and reproducible builds, continuous integration and testing, multi-cloud deployments. In the couple of months before the product launch, Catalyst pushed more than 100 releases to production. That enabled rapid adaptations based on extensive user testing, resulting in a site that won awards for it’s design and user friendliness.
Similarly, Catalyst worked with the TAB to revolutionise the way it is able to deliver its services by adopting a Cloud Native approach. That approach to the TAB's architecture and tooling allows us to manage a significant number of workloads distributed across two cloud providers, three regions, and five availability zones – ensuring high availability of critical business systems, one of TAB’s key business requirements.
In addition to a distributed architecture, our automated pipelines, provisioning, security scanning, and patching procedures means zero downtime patching, and a rapid, safe process from feature development right through to customer use in production. This provides a stable, agile platform for TAB to innovate and evolve their service offerings.
Another key benefit of this approach is auto-scaling: cloud costs are optimised to current usage, rather than, for example, paying for the same resources overnight when traffic is not as heavy. Overall, these improvements deliver significant cost savings, and greater value to the end customer.
One other overlooked benefit of Cloud Native is re-working architecture in scope for compliance. For example, for one client we reduced infrastructure costs by more than $100,000 per year, while lowering the overhead of maintaining compliance with each year's audit by making small but well thought-out design changes to limit scope.
Collectively, these approaches and adaptations to the cloud environment deliver a huge competitive advantage to organisations.
Developing a roadmap for Cloud Native, irrespective of your starting point, will deliver immediate benefits, either in terms of crystalising your planning and strategy, or the sorts of tangible benefits above. In any event, the combination of the maturing of the technology and the pressing need for businesses to be able to adapt, means Cloud Native should definitely be something that your organisation is actively considering.
Catalyst, a Newsroom foundation supporter, has years of experience building and running cloud infrastructure and Cloud Native applications across AWS, Azure, and the Catalyst Cloud which runs the open source cloud developed by NASA and Rackspace, OpenStack. This article is contributed as part of a content partnership.
