Solving Common Cloud-Native Application Development Challenges

Ebenezer Schubert, the Vice President Of Engineering at OutSystems, discusses how companies can start solving some of the most common cloud-native application development challenges. This article originally appeared in Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.

While enterprises have widely moved to the cloud, expecting to see benefits in lowered costs, increased agility, and faster scalability, many cannot access the full range of capabilities as they fail to redesign applications as cloud-native. This lack of distinction between cloud and cloud-native results in applications that cannot adhere to new security, performance, and availability requirements imposed by the cloud. Rather than cutting costs, this leads to runaway costs and makes it difficult to achieve the agility and elasticity promised by cloud infrastructure.

In an unpredictable business landscape driven by the explosion of generative AI, enterprises rely on cloud-native technology even more to achieve scalability, efficiency, and speed.

By some estimates, the cloud-native application market is poised to reach $48.8 billion globally by 2032, showcasing the immense growth and adoption of this transformative technology. Despite the clear demand for cloud-native technology and its prevalence in enterprise technology stacks, many teams still struggle with implementation. In fact, nearly two-thirds of executives, including IT experts, say their organizations struggle to keep up with the evolving technology roles and responsibilities necessary to manage the growing adoption of cloud services.

Specifically, organizations are struggling to keep infrastructure up-to-date with scalability and security advancements, build specialized teams, and eliminate communication gaps.

Meeting Customer Demands

As cloud-native transformation accelerates and the demand for organizations to incorporate AI into their offerings grows, businesses face pressure from their customers to rapidly deliver better, more personalized experiences.

These rising standards mean that no industry, from financial services to retail to manufacturing, can afford to take weeks or months to update its application infrastructure. Unfortunately, on average, implementing a cloud-native development transition can take up to two years and $5.6 million. App updates need to be more flexible, easier to implement within hours instead of days or weeks, and cost-effective, but delivering on that promise takes time and investment.

Gartner expects public cloud spending to increase 20.4 percent year over year in 2024, so cloud-native transformation has never been more urgent or essential. That’s why investing in cloud-native approaches requires an investment in infrastructure that supports automation. From low-code to AI, incorporating workflows that can streamline tasks in the continuous improvement/continuous development (CI/CD) process enables organizations to iterate on their solutions more efficiently and deliver them to customers nearly instantaneously.

However, while considering business goals and customer needs is vital, it is not the only obstacle tripping up organizations trying to go cloud-native. The complexity of the technology itself, particularly when it comes to security and performance, requires a deft hand and smart investment.

Security and Scalability 

Maintaining secure and scalable infrastructure can be daunting, requiring meticulous management and governance. While traditional on-premise environments rely on static, centralized security measures, the decentralized structure of cloud-native environments requires a more dynamic approach to security that protects applications and data across multiple clouds, containers, and microservices.

IT leaders must navigate the complexities of resource allocation, ensuring that developers have the flexibility to meet shifting demands while remaining cost-efficient. Performance optimization is also paramount and requires continuous monitoring and fine-tuning to maintain efficiency.

By embracing low-code tools that have the capabilities to build cloud-native applications, organizations can streamline the application development process, building scalable and secure applications with ease while mitigating concerns about infrastructure management and governance. Furthermore, selecting a cloud development platform equipped with automatic scaling capabilities and a simplified resource allocation process ensures that organizations can effortlessly adapt to changing expectations without compromising performance or reliability.

Crucially, prioritizing security features such as end-to-end encryption, multi-factor authentication, and regular data backups enhances the resilience of cloud-native applications, safeguarding sensitive data and bolstering trust among stakeholders. With these solutions in place, organizations can confidently navigate the complexities of cloud-native environments, unlocking new opportunities for innovation and growth.

Building the Right Team and Skills

Having the right people with the right skills is as important as having the right technical solutions for overcoming the challenges of implementing cloud-native technologies. Over 90 percent of IT leaders intend to enhance their modern software engineering and cloud environments. However, 80 percent face employee skills gaps that hinder their success in deploying cloud-native technologies.

Building a team with the specialized skills needed to go cloud-native is an essential part of the equation. It is challenging to find tech leaders who bring an understanding of the business’s application and experience in cloud-native technologies to the table. Cloud-native technologies require a high cognitive load from developers, which includes managing the complexities of scaling, securing, and maintaining availability. Utilizing low-code platforms for cloud-native technologies abstracts these demands, allowing developers to focus on the application and speeding up the process of rebuilding applications when it is the sole course of action.

Choosing the Right Approach to Cloud-Native: Rebuild vs. Slow Migration

When adopting a cloud-native approach, organizations should begin by determining whether they will opt to rebuild existing applications or slowly migrate assets to the cloud.

The route of incremental migration offers a process that moves applications and data without interfering with business operations. To carefully execute a migration plan, businesses should continuously monitor issues, immediately addressing any challenges while implementing security measures to safeguard data during the shift. This is the fastest migration method that requires minimal changes, but organizations may not maximize their cloud-native advantages.

On the other hand, businesses that decide to rebuild and redesign their applications to be cloud-native can reap the full benefits of the cloud. While this has historically required notable time and resources, rebuilding allows prolonged benefits that will bring greater competitive advantage in the long run. Through the use of low-code tools in developing cloud-native applications, the process of rebuilding and redesigning can be streamlined, removing the high costs and complexities that would have steered companies away from this approach.

Rising to the Challenge

Transitioning to a cloud-native approach to application development offers unparalleled benefits – and while the barriers to adoption may feel intimidating, they are not impossible to overcome. Cloud-native development and application deployment are not limited to large, elite enterprises with robust IT teams; with the right strategies and solutions, organizations of all sizes can harness their potential and achieve cloud-native success in a rapidly shifting technological landscape.