Multi-cloud Interoperability: Embrace Cloud Native, Beware of Native Cloud | Blog

Our research suggests that more than 90 percent of enterprises around the world have adopted cloud services in some shape or form. Additionally, 46 percent of them run a multi-cloud environment and 59 percent have adopted more advanced concepts like containers and microservices in their production set-up.  As they go deeper into the cloud ecosystem to realize even more value, they need to be careful of two seemingly similar but vastly different concepts: cloud native and native cloud.

What are Cloud Native and Native Cloud?

Cloud native used to refer to more container-centric workloads. However, at Everest Group, we define cloud native as building blocks of digital workloads that are scalable, flexible, resilient, and responsive to business demands for agility. These workloads are developer centric and operationally better than their “non-cloud” brethren.

Earlier, native cloud meant any workloads using cloud services. Now – just like in the mobile world where apps are “native Android or iOS,” meaning specifically built for these operating systems – native cloud refers to leveraging the capabilities of a specific cloud vendor to build a workload that is not available “like-to-like’ in other platforms. These are innovative disruptive offerings such as cloud-based relational database services, serverless instances, developer platforms, AI capabilities, workload monitoring, and cost management. They are not portable across other cloud platforms without a huge amount of rework.

With these evolutions, we recommend that enterprises…

Embrace Cloud Native

Cloud native workloads provide the fundamental flexibility and business agility enterprises are looking for. They thrive on cloud platforms’ core capabilities without getting tied to them. So, if need be, the workloads can easily be ported to other cloud platforms without any meaningful rework or drop in performance. Cloud native workloads also allow enterprises to build hybrid cloud environments.

And Be Cautious of Native Cloud

Most cloud vendors have built meaningfully advanced capabilities into their platforms. Because these capabilities are largely native to their own cloud stack, they are difficult to port across to other environments without considerable investment. And if – more likely, when – the cloud vendor makes changes to its functional, technical, or commercial model, the enterprise finds it tough to move away from the platform…the workloads essentially become prisoners of that platform.

At the same time, native cloud capabilities are fundamentally disruptive and very useful for enterprise workloads. However, to adopt such advanced features in the right manner and still be able build a multi-cloud strategy, enterprises need the necessary architectural, technical, deployment, and support capabilities. For example, in a serverless application, the architect can put business logic in a container and the event trigger in serverless code. With that approach, when porting to another platform, the container can be directly ported and only the event trigger needs to change.

Overall, enterprise architects need to be cautious of how deep they are going into a cloud stack.

Going Forward

Given that cloud platform feature functionality parity is becoming common, cloud vendors will increasingly push enterprises to go deeper into their stack. The on-premise cloud stack offered by all three large hyperscalers – Amazon Web Services, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform — is an extension of this strategy. Enterprise architects need to have a well thought out plan if they want to go deeper into a cloud stack. They must evaluate the interoperability of their workloads and run simulations at every critical juncture. Although it is unlikely that an enterprise would completely move off a particular cloud platform, enterprise architects should make sure they have the ability to compartmentalize workloads to work in unison and interoperate across a multi-cloud environment.

Please share your cloud native and native cloud experiences with me at [email protected].

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