3 Application Development Strategies to Avoid Cloud Adoption Pitfalls

‘Stored in the cloud’, ‘access anywhere from the cloud’,  ‘running in the cloud’ - these today are everyday terms and signify the prolific penetration of cloud infrastructure in our regular lives. But is it all enough to make cloud computing a savior for businesses? Precisely! 

Since the early days of cloud adoption by organizations, the success stories are plenty. What makes cloud adoption wildly popular and a big deal is the:

• Cost Saving & Security: Both private and public cloud entail cost and security advantages over traditional methods. Moreover, the dynamic nature of cloud storage ensures that you never run out of space. If needed, organizations can simply buy in more capacity; no infrastructure overhaul is required.
• Connectivity & Accessibility: All your team needs is a device and that’s all. They are free to connect from anywhere and work.
• Lightning-fast everything: Faster deployment, increased collaboration & improved efficiency are the added benefits of cloud service.
• Reduced risk of data loss

This successfully projects cloud as a much needed infrastructure element for driving business growth and success. What’s more, it truly levels the playing field. Even small and medium enterprises too can utilize IT infrastructure benefits without actually burning a hole in their pockets. And of course, the additional benefits expand the horizon of experimenting. This in turn enables the in-house teams to innovate and pioneer cutting-edge capabilities to increase revenue and gain market share. Thus, cloud computing is one of the basics of modern application development. 

Modern Application Development - The Key to Resolving Long-Standing Legacy System Issues

With cloud at its core, modern application development resolves issues such as: 

• Tightly coupled monolithic, legacy systems
• Fragmented developer and operator experience
• Lack of observability and tele-metrics

Organizations with existing applications built and operating on monolithic and legacy systems face their own set of challenges. Legacy applications are not being actively updated, only barely maintained. Gradually these will get phased out. 

On the other hand, monolithic applications’ fixed and linear nature hinders the team’s ability to scale, manage, and update the application over time. Moreover, even basic updates require the entire application to be redeployed. And this also extends to technical limitations since the developers must use the same technology stack throughout the application for further software development. 

The microservice-based application development resolves these issues from the core. Each microservice is loosely coupled allowing the development teams to easily test each component and make changes to them over time. This inherently streamlines the scaling efforts and the required resource allocation. 

All these things de facto improve the developer and operator experience. Implementing unified cloud management systems, such as Kubernetes on top of this, establishes a single pane of glass view and brings in the required observability and ability to measure metrics.  

But despite these benefits, cloud migration strategy fails!

Although moving to the cloud is eventual, but not always successful for every enterprise. An IBM report states that about 30% of these initiatives fail. The reasons can be majorly bucketed under these categories:

• Business and IT misalignment:  There’s an overwhelming imbalance in how cloud programs are driven and utilized. While it is driven by IT, the value is unlocked by business operations. However, to unlock its true value operations actually need to accommodate the cloud in their regular functioning. However, CIOs are rarely aligned to drive these changes themselves. This simply adds to the reluctance of business executives to own responsibility for these cloud programs. 
• Underestimating technology complexity: More often than not the management terribly underestimates the complexities in the successful execution of cloud modernization. It certainly has the appeal of moving out from managing in-house data centers and creating more space for innovative capabilities, highly distributed systems, and microservice-driven architecture - all the contributing factors of the next-gen intelligent applications. However, what businesses fail to realize is the need to manage hybrid cloud environments. This adds a significant layer of complexity to platform and infrastructure operations. Additionally, organizations with a large number of applications, each of which may require porting to the cloud, bring in additional time and cost consequences.
• Overestimating organizational alignment: It would be wrong to say that CIOs vehemently disagree with the need to change their operating model to streamline working in the new hybrid cloud environment. But, their approach to this change is more of a “boxes and arrows” exercise. So to say, they believe in shuffling and regrouping the teams rather than working on breaking down silos, identifying inefficiencies, and fundamentally changing the teams workflow. Therefore, it is only with high levels of cloud automation that the technology teams can keep up with expectations. But unfortunately, only a few companies explicitly invest in automation, which is required to transform IT delivery to make the most out of these new technologies.

Acing modern application development requires a holistic view

Someone had rightly said ‘Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly’. While It is true that some organizations fail in their cloud efforts, the key to breaking this juggernaut lies within the broken pieces of the puzzle. Organizations need to retrace their steps and identify the gaps in the implementation and adoption strategies. Having worked as a cloud implementation partner for numerous projects, we summarize our observations in the form of these pillars: 

• Platform Strategy: When organizations consider modern app development, they should consider investing in a self-service platform for their product teams. This enables them to have standardized processes, workflows and tooling in a centralized location, which helps in moving their apps to the desired cloud environment with reliable speed and consistency. Moreover, this establishes a common ground for developers and operators and improves their experience. At the end of the cycle, the organization-wide adaptation does not become a mere checkbox. Rather, developers are drawn to it on account of its benefits. This standardization also reduces the hassle for the developers and shortens the time to market innovative products and services with continuous integration.
• Application Modernization Strategy: When in the process of modernizing legacy monolith applications or migrating existing apps to the cloud, it is important to onboard them on a well-defined cloud platform. It is also imperative to identify a cloud strategy based on business objectives and also on the current state of applications. In case of multi-cloud adoption, establishing a single pane of glass view should be a priority. This is where a layer of VMWare Tanzu should be deployed on top of these for achieving the ease of management and observability. 
• Management & Optimization: Moving to the cloud or being cloud-native is not sufficient to ensure a successful transformation and reap its benefits. It is the measurable metrics and KPIs that indicate the actual performance. Therefore, your efforts require complete transparency and also helps manage incidents. Setting up a constant feedback loop which is allowed by the platform, enables predictive maintenance of applications and constant improvement. This is where SRE approach can be brought in to ensure continuous cloud availability that accounts for a reliable solution for your customer. Adopting SRE in the new IT Ops model becomes a fundamental necessity than being a choice to meet the customers’ expectations.

As a cloud implementation and adoption partner, Srijan always begins an engagement with the discovery phase. This helps us understand what our customers actually need and what is feasible for their setup. Moreover, we do not leave our customers just at implementation, our SRE services are aligned to our cloud enablement services. This ensures that the cloud services actually bring out the benefits which our customers signed up for. To explore what we can do for you, talk to us.