Cloud native is the future, says UK Plc

...but we’re not there yet

According to a recent Computing Delta study, cloud native is the future of enterprise software.

The majority (55%) of 100 IT leaders polled said cloud native is the "way of the future for enterprise apps". This opinion was consistent across organisational sizes, although those in the public sector were less likely to agree (35% agreed, while 33% saw it as "mostly a buzz phrase").

Would you say cloud native is...

Base: 119 UK IT leaders

But what is cloud native? On its own it's not particularly descriptive term, and the largest proportion (35%) viewed it as meaning "A set of development, deployment and operations strategies designed solely for cloud-based applications," which is not quite accurate as cloud native applications can span on-premises developments too. Better is the following: "The use of technologies such as containers and microservices to develop and deploy scalable applications on cloud platforms", which was picked by 31 per cent.

Which of the following best fits with your understanding of the term cloud native?

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation describes it thus: "Cloud native technologies empower organisations to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds. Containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure and declarative APIs exemplify this approach."

Nebulous labelling of technological concepts is nothing new (cf cloud, big data, Web3), and definitional vagueness allows new technologies to be pulled under the umbrella, but it's striking that the understanding of cloud native by our audience is almost exactly the same as it was 18 months ago when we last ran this survey, with perhaps an element of realism introduced as the numbers saying it is the "way of the future" dropped a little.

Cloud native, according to Cheryl Hung, founder of Cloud Native London, is "about shipping small things incrementally, and making continual improvements, rather than the old world of do one release a month. And then it's all the tooling and technology that supports that style."

Those tools include containers, container orchestration platforms and associated services, and whatever you make of the term cloud native, use of which were all on the increase.

Which of the following technologies are you using or planning to use in the near future?

Base: 118 (2020) / 99 (2022) UK IT leaders at organisations that develop software

Cloud native solutions were more likely to be adopted by large organisations with more than 2,500 employees, and less likely in the public sector, which is necessarily slower moving, less likely to develop software, and more likely to wedded to long term contracts than, for example, the technology and telecoms sector where uptake was highest. Among larger (2,500+) tech firms Kubernetes and containers were ubiquitous (90%+), and almost half had adopted or were looking to adopt service meshes, while in large public sector organisations less than half were using Kubernetes or planning to, and only 10 per cent using service meshes.

Service meshes

Service meshes exist to simplify the management of microservices and make large scale networks more reliable. Examples include Istio, Kuma and Linkerd. A recent survey of large organisations (2,000+) for connectivity platform provider Kong found that more than half were running 50 to 499 microservices up from 44 in 2021. Managing large numbers of microservices becomes cumbersome which is where service meshes come into play.

Our survey noted a small rise in the current or planned of service meshes over the last 18 months from 10 per cent to 13 per cent. The Kong study found higher rates, averaging 33 per cent of UK organisations surveyed, although that survey did not include public sector organisations.

Kong found that the biggest drivers for adopting a service mesh were service connectivity/service discovery/traffic reliability, zero-trust security of services, and traffic observability.

However, none of this comes for free. Ensuring performance at scale and complexity in deploying, managing and scaling up the mesh were the two biggest factors mentioned.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes has arrived at a level of maturity that has made it the standard way to manage containerised applications at scale and on any platform, automating many of the tasks required with features such as self-healing infrastructure, REST APIs and the use of declarative templates. It is being built into many infrastructure services, so that developers don't need to even know it's there.

Nevertheless, Kubernetes is really just the centre of an ecosystem, with other products required to achieve its advantages, which can bring complexity of its own.

The Computing Delta study found that a dearth of available skills was the main barrier with Kubernetes and cloud native more generally, while complexity and compliance were found to be the biggest bugbears for Kubernetes users in the Kong survey. These findings may explain the rising popularity of the managed Kubernetes services such as EKS, GKE and AKS.

Some organisations are refactoring even quite complex applications to work in containers, sometimes decomposing them into microservices, to make them more resilient or amenable to automation. Again, this practice was becoming more popular.

We have used cloud native technologies to

Base: 104 (2020) / 99 (2022) companies using/ about to start with cloud native

The rising uptake of microservices, containers and supporting technologies, as well as the increasing adoption of cloud, Agile and DevOps - with which it is a good fit - indicates that the future of enterprise applications will tend to follow the cloud native model, although skills and complexity remain a significant hurdle.