Cloud computing has become a trendy term recently. It has brought also such words as migration, adoption, or native. If some time ago the IT industry may have perceived them as funky newspeak, now the majority of specialists has no doubt that tangible results are standing behind those expressions.
Cloud solutions have an impact on a business. If consciously implemented, they make room for innovation and growth. And cloud natives benefit most due to delegation of the maintenance work to a provider, employment of managed services, or an introduction of automation.
The Meaning of a Cloud-Native
A public cloud consists of enormous disk space, almost unlimited computing power, and hundreds of advanced ready-made services that run on demand. All of this is on vendor-maintained machines, with high availability, performance, and best-in-class security mechanisms.
Most of those cloud services are maintained – meaning that processes like provisioning, up- and downscaling, load balancing, health checks and autohealings, or object lifecycle management may be automated.
But to make the most of managed services, the product’s source code has to go hand in hand with the infrastructure solution. The cloud-native approach is about designing and developing apps that fully leverage advantages of the cloud computing delivery model. Also, companies with cloud-first approach can be named cloud natives.
Does the cloud-native equal making a cloud-customized application from the very beginning? No, it does not. If you have an application that runs on-premise, on hosting or VPS solution, you can migrate it to the cloud. But to make it truly cloud-native, you have to rewrite the code to adopt cloud solutions.
As a Google Cloud partner, we have participated in numerous migration processes and have supported our customers in enhancing legacy-infrastructure applications to a fully cloud-native ones. Based on our and our customers’ experiences, here are five areas in which cloud natives have been excelling.
1. Global Availability and Performance
At the physical level, the cloud is a set of millions interconnected servers located all over the world. On a level of abstraction, it is a bunch of clusters – zones and regions – that allow the application to maintain high availability even in the event of a failure on the provider’s side.
Speaking of Google’s infrastructure, the Google Cloud Platform has 29 regions consisting of at least 3 zones each. Add 146 network edge locations, and we’ll get the result of cloud availability in more than 200 countries and territories. Google’s data centres are connected with thousands of kilometres of optical fibre cables with transmission speed up to 10 Tb/s (which is a few times more than AWS or Azure provide).
The fibre-optic network connecting Google Cloud Platform regions. Blue lines are functioning connections, and green investments underway.
As a cloud-native company, if you want to ensure a flawless experience for your target group (even in the other hemisphere) all you have to do is deploy resources in a zone closest to the users. In terms of infrastructure, you can enter a new market in a few clicks in the cloud console.
2. Scalability
Hardly any hosting or VPS provider offers autoscaling, just like it is unattainable on an on-premise solution. Meaning, yes, you can set autoscaling on on-premise, i.a. with Kubernetes, but the compute power of physical machines ends somewhere and extending it comes with buying more servers. In all three cases, if you wanted to prepare for the increased load, you would have to pay in advance for your foresight.
Cloud natives rely on autoscaling, where the level of virtual resources adjusts to the real-time load. In a situation of increased traffic, the infrastructure will maintain high availability thanks to the upscaling. And after the peak, services will downscale in seconds, lowering the price. In some cases, the usage can jump down even to zero instances, meaning that you will not pay at all.
Cloud natives also get extra points for long-term scaling. Adaption of cloud solutions allows seamless extension of the infrastructure along with the growth of business needs. The resources – especially if in microservice architecture – are portable, and can be easily moved to other cloud services.
3. Total Cost of Ownership
As mentioned, cloud billing is based on the pay-as-you-use model. If we were to compare the monthly spending, the cloud would probably turn out to be more expensive than on-premise, hosting, or VPS. But there is one amount that matters more than a bill, and it is TCO – the total cost of ownership.
Carrying on physical infrastructure or private servers costs time. Companies spend money not only on hardware or services but also on in-house maintenance. That is the time and energy of Sys and DevOps, which could be moved to the area of development, if the aftercare was delegated to the provider, plus processes automated. One of our customers – a leading Polish e-commerce company – saves 20-30% of infrastructure maintenance monthly cost thanks to the migration from on-premise to GCP managed cloud services.
Moreover, Google Cloud gives opportunities to save up to 91% compute power costs with Spot VMs, up to 70% with committed use discounts, or 30% with sustained use discounts. Cloud natives may also look for cost reductions together with a partner in terms of architecture audits and modernization, implementation of exclusive markdowns, or free credits (FOTC’s new customers get a $500 voucher to spend on the GCP services).
4. Innovation Delivery
The transfer of manpower from maintenance to development accelerates the company’s innovation. Feed those hungry minds with hundreds of ready-made cloud services, and you will get great results.
The cloud is an idea-friendly environment. With serverless platforms, cloud natives can build proof of concepts or roll out new features faster. Streaming analytics, cloud warehouses, along with visualization tools, let them democratize data and make it accessible for every employee in a matter of seconds. Modern businesses can also easily reach for pre-trained machine learning and artificial intelligence models to extend the app user experience.
Cloud natives already have the underlying infrastructure that supports the growth. In many cases, introducing a new idea requires only a few lines of code deployed in a cloud service (which can be also easily rolled back). Often, new product updates are supported by CI/CD pipeline, which is… also built in the cloud.
5. Employee Satisfaction
The cloud-native approach allows finding a common language with new technologies, as well as getting along in product development teams. Business, developers, operation specialists, and security experts can easier find solutions to each other’s demands and implement them faster. Where on-premise teams are experiencing frictions, cloud natives have points of contact.
Hardly anyone enjoys untangling legacy infrastructure cables, writing code in unsupported programming languages, or arguing during every release. That is why cutting-edge technologies and cloud-native workflows are attractive for ambitious employees. According to the 2021 Developer Survey by Stack Overflow, almost 60% of IT specialists point to GCP as their loved cloud platform.
Leverage the cloud-native approach with the Google Cloud partner
Being a cloud native pays off, especially when you invest the resources properly. FOTC – an official Google Cloud partner – has the necessary strategic knowledge to help you succeed.
For over six years, we have been assisting organizations in implementing Google Cloud services and optimizing their costs. We can help you select the right solutions, take care of planning, data migration, training, and provide ongoing support. Over 2,000 European companies and 100,00 end users of cloud products have benefited from cooperating with us. With over 70 experts on board, we have expert knowledge and industry experience, confirmed by dozens of official certificates.
If you want to increase your business agility, reduce cost, or speed up the development of digital products using Google Cloud solutions, do it with the experienced Google Cloud partner. Find out more about cooperation opportunities on FOTC’s website: fotc.com
