Cloud-Native Microservices: The Next Shift

All companies want to innovate currently today not everyone can actually. There are several bottlenecks for innovation. The technology it's often part of the problem and part of the solution.

Software architect there is a crucial role in enabling solutions that not only scale and are available but also that make the difference.

Many companies have monoliths or have several monolith systems and they are having trouble to keep up with the market pace of innovation.

The cloud seems to be the right place to go. However, if we don't think how to do it we could be trapped in a problem bigger than we think.

Currently, Microservices become a de-facto standard of architecture for several problems however in order to get more benefit from micro services we need do some mindset shifts. I'm not talking about basic shifts such as Independence and Isolation.




From Process to Automation

The first big shift we need to do is from Process to Automation. I don't mean by infrastructure automation only I mean by Software Automation. It's clear that Lean and Agile methods are the way to go. However many many companies are not that agile and maybe they will never be. How easy is to change your management?

IMHO Lean is how all orgs should be operating but not every org needs to focus on cultural and managerial changes in order to benefit from IT speed. You definitely can change architecture first. Don't get me wrong still hard but easier if we compare with people change.  IF you can have independent teams working with different systems you are able to care less how this team works and what kind of management they have and care more about innovating.  Don't get me wrong but you may not need to go through an agile revolution in order to be able to create great products.  People don't scale. Software scales.

From Lock IN to Portability

It's very easy to use managed services and speed up your business. However, all cloud providers have issues and as cloud computing becomes the de facto industry standard and vendors add more feature it tends to become about price. How prices are low, your architecture and infrastructure will be portable? Would you able to run multi-cloud? Cloud-Native is really about leveraging Open Source and being multi-cloud.

Forget the cost if you don't care about cost you still have a greater competitive advantage for not being totally HOLD by the cloud vendor and also you have better availability since you can spin up instances in other places in cases of greater outages or imagine you are sensitive to latency you can run where is better.

From Proprietary to Open Source

Open source it's great for many reasons but between this many reasons you can easily get skilled workers from the market and this increase, the people offer to you since you can let the market grown up people for you. OSS enable faster innovation because you literally can go there and fix the problems rather than being FREEZED and need to wait for a feature or an increased limit that may or may never come.

Here There is a video about some of this ideas.



Cloud Native Microservices from Diego Pacheco on Vimeo.


Are you prepared for the future?

Where you want to be in 3-5 years? Rebuilding everything or just doing minor tweaks? How you are preventing yourself to creating a future-monolith? How locked by your cloud vendor are you?

Cheers,
Diego Pacheco

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