Cloud-native apps are fully utilizing the operational paradigm of the cloud, which create business value through self-provisioning, scalability, and redundancy.
App developers create apps that can grow quickly in response to market demand. This is done by disassembling monolithic software into separate, but interconnected containers.
Cloud-native computing allows you to create and deploy code wherever you like, private, public, hybrid, and public.
According to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, there are around 11.2 million cloud-native developers. The usage of cloud-native architecture continues to grow.
Cloud-native computing is a great idea in principle but it can be difficult to implement, especially if you have legacy apps.
It's easy for people to get overwhelmed by the number of technologies and platforms that are available in the cloud-native market.
Cloud-native products must be tailored to your needs. However, cultural changes must be made to encourage their use. Reforms and cultural changes must be implemented slowly but comprehensively.
Here are ten common issues businesses face when switching to a cloud-native environment.
What is Cloud-Native?
Before we get into the details of the challenges of using cloud-native technology, let's talk briefly about cloud-native architecture.
Cloud-native is the term for the concept of creating and running applications that take advantage of remote computing capabilities offered by the cloud delivery paradigm.
Cloud Native Apps were created to maximize the cloud's flexibility, size, scalability, and, resilience.
Cloud-native technology allows for the development and operation of scalable applications on both public and private clouds according to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
This strategy is best illustrated with features such as containers (companies Dot Net, benefits of Containerization), service meshes, and, microservices. These properties allow for robust, controllable, and easily viewed loosely coupled systems.
These allow engineers to make frequent and significant modifications quickly.
A study by Gartner has shown that more than 95% (up 30% from 2021) of the most recent technological workloads will be hosted on cloud-native platforms by 2025.
The Top Ten Challenges Businesses Face When Moving to a Cloud Native Infrastructure
1. Inefficiencies can Become a Big Deal When You Use a Utility Model For Payment
Although teams may be used to paying utility-style prices for physical and virtual servers that they have bought, this is not true for cloud-native infrastructure.
Cloud-native design can lead to additional expenditures that you will need to manage in a utility-style pricing system. The amount of usage determines the price.
There are many scaled sunk-cost options, including virtual or physical computers with on-premises installation and conventionally moved designs.
Serverless functions are a good option for replacing the server.
Serverless services can, however, be more expensive than cloud-native systems if they are not properly identified.
Scale-out operations can lead to high storage, high concurrency, and long functions that can significantly increase expenses. It is important to identify wasteful cloud resources to avoid unanticipated expenses with cloud-native infrastructure.
2. You Deal With Temporary Components as Well as Mutable Microservices
When using on-premises or hosted servers, you have a predetermined and limited amount of computing resources.
Contrary to popular belief, cloud-native microservices can be accessed on demand, are flexible in terms of number and durability, often unstructured, and are temporary only for as long as they are needed. If a microservice has changed or stopped working, it can be difficult to identify what went wrong.
3. The User doesn’t Know Much About the Underlying System
The lack of basic knowledge and insight is a major barrier to moving to cloud-native infrastructure. It can be confusing to understand the process of managing the infrastructure.
To learn more about infrastructure, it is essential to first identify the source services. An observability solution is required to help you identify the source services.
You can also use the observability platform to identify any issues. Even if the issue is cloud-based, but not under your administrative control, the observability platform will identify it.
Cloud suppliers may offer monitoring services that allow you to inspect your entire system. This helps in diagnosing problems.
4. Security Becomes More Important But Also More Challenging
It is important to consider security every day, especially when there is a serious incident.
Security is more difficult when you lack accessibility and awareness. It is easy to overlook some important security issues because it is hard to see everything.
When there are a lot of security data to be reviewed, the cost of investigation and analysis increases. It is up to you to decide what data from cloud-native infrastructure are valuable.
It is difficult to establish uniform regulations for systems that utilize many cloud technologies, hybrid clouds, or a combination of them. A cloud infrastructure that is not properly constructed can be vulnerable to attacks.
You must also be able to react quickly. Cloud security can be just as complex as traditional apps.
By creating strong security procedures, companies must ensure a secure network for cloud-based IP security cameras (avigilon). This will help protect every part of the network from cybercrime, as attackers expand their attack surface and find new loopholes in their infrastructure.
5. Service Integration
Cloud-native apps are often built using a variety of services. They are much more flexible and scalable than monolithic applications, due to their dynamic nature.
It also means that cloud-native workloads must be successful, which means that many moving parts need to be worked together.
Developers creating cloud-native apps must deal with service integration.
It is smart to create a separate service for every type of operation within a workload, rather than trying to make one service do multiple things.
They should double-check that every service source is properly scaled. It is important to not add additional services just because you can. If you add a new service to your program, verify that it serves a specific purpose.
Service integration is only possible if you choose the right distribution methods and the core design of your application. Containers are the best way to deploy multiple services and combine them into one task. In other cases, however, it may be more advantageous to use serverless functions and non-containerized applications coupled via APIs.
6. Cloud-Native Delivery Pipelines For App Construction
Cloud-native apps can be used online. The cloud refers to unchangeable architecture, and cloud management procedures, and it doesn't matter if the cloud is running on your company's settings, whether they are private, public on-premises, or hybrid cloud.
Many application delivery pipelines still use traditional on-premises settings. They are not cloud-ified, or inefficient when combined using programs and services that run on containers or in public clouds.
This can lead to many problems. There are potential delays in distributing code from a private or local environment to an on-premises platform. Another issue is the difficulty of simulating production environments when creating and analyzing locally. This could lead to unpredictable behavior in applications after deployment.
Relocating your CI/CD pipeline to a cloud system is one of the best ways to overcome these challenges. This will enable you to reap the benefits of the cloud's scalability, infallible infrastructure, and other advantages while simulating your production system and bringing the pipeline as close as possible to your applications.
This allows for faster distribution as the code is written closer to the location. It is also easier to create test environments that look exactly like real-world ones.
Some programmers prefer local IDEs to cloud-based systems.
Nevertheless, you should ensure that your CI/CD pipelines operate in a cloud environment as much as possible.
7. Both Organizational Change and Teams With Competently Skilled Personnel are Essential: If They’re Not Available, It Becomes an Issue
Different organizations and businesses discover that the DevOps culture and approach of their teams must shift to CI/CD when dealing with cloud-native infrastructure. As they change their work culture, teams will require unique skills and abilities.
All team members need to be fully involved in disruptions that occur in a cloud-native environment. Teams will need to develop cloud architect skills.
Specialized knowledge is required to develop and design apps that use microservices, containers, and Kubernetes as well as those which make use of public cloud services.
Everybody, including operations and research, needs to be observable when micro-failures occur and quickly dealt with.
Both developers and ops engineers are interested in performance indicators such as Apdex, the average response time, error rate, throughput, and error rates.
These failures and unwelcome situations can be quickly addressed by observing. You can move faster.
8. Cloud-Native Design is Intertwined With Reliability Issues
You must have a plan to take advantage of cloud platforms and their capabilities to avoid reliability issues. Reliability can be costly and difficult to achieve when different environments are used.
A single cloud should allow you to monitor your reliability and dependability. This will allow you to track stability and performance data such as the page's slow load time, to assess whether your strategies are working.
Designing for reliability is not enough. You must also be able to track reliability and performance, from the user interface on one side to the backend infrastructure.
Reliability can come in many forms. You may not always be aware of your risks. You cannot make a hugely scalable architectural decision without continuing to observe.
To determine your profitability, you will need an observability tool.
9. Management and Oversight Problem
It is more difficult to control and monitor the services within an application that has many active services. This is true because there are so many operations to track.
To ensure the stability and functionality of an application, it is important to observe interactions between services.
To effectively monitor and control cloud-native operations, you need a strategy that can predict how errors in one service could affect other services and pinpoint the most critical problems.
Dynamic baselining, which involves replacing static criteria with those that constantly evaluate the application environments to determine what is acceptable and unacceptable, is also criticized.
10. Service Provider Lock-in & Restricted Space for Expansion
If you have committed to a particular system or technology, vendor lock-in is possible. Cloud providers' platforms can be complicated to use, but they are generally packed with features. They often come with a lock-in penalty.
Cloud-native computing allows you to use massively scalable cloud providers while still being able to consider multifaceted and hybrid cloud infrastructures.
Conclusion
A Statista study found that the most popular cloud-native use case for enterprises in 2022 is the re-architecture and integration of proprietary solutions into microservices. About 19% of those surveyed agree with this conclusion.
Participants rated application testing and deployment as the second most popular use case.
However, adapting to the cloud can be difficult regardless of your perspective. Cloud-native apps are more complex and have more risk than traditional applications.
Cloud-native computing can be made more responsive, reliable, and scalable by addressing the issues that cloud-native computing presents.