Secrets of Cloud-Native Architecture: What They Don’t Tell You About Scaling

Author: Roman Shmyhelskyi, a Ukrainian Software Engineering Manager at Hitachi Vantara, specializing in leadership, strategic planning, and team management. With expertise in technologies such as JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Angular, and Node.js, he has successfully managed global teams and led the development of innovative web-based applications. Roman is passionate about driving innovation, fostering a culture of accountability, and delivering impactful results that optimize performance and enhance user experiences.

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Cloud-native is a fundamental rethinking of how to develop, deploy, and scale software. For someone like me, who has spent years navigating the distributed-computing world, the cloud-native ecosystem feels right. Not because it is easy; in fact, it is probably as hard as any solution I have ever seen. But it is also a clean ecosystem, one in which all the parts work together in seemingly obvious ways. That’s the right way to design an architectural style for something that is going to live in the cloud.

The Evolving Landscape of Software Architecture

Understanding the history of software development helps us appreciate the nature of cloud-native architecture. The massive, monolithic machines were the precursors to anything like a cloud-native architecture, but even they were far less complex than a monolithic application of today. Even the intricate designs of those massive machines pale next to the impossible interconnectedness of a monolithic application of today.

The very name “monolith” suggests that one change is bound to affect everything else within the apparatus. Developers often feel (and always have felt) tightly constrained, like they’re maintaining an impossible mechanism (it’s impossible because it’s not designed to be modified) rather than forging a dynamic, responsive, and much more human solution.

Cloud-native architecture started out as a pretty radical alternative; it’s more than just a techy strategy. It is, in fact, a totally substitute all-encompassing methodology that completely rethinks how software can be designed, developed, and maintained. If you think of architectural methods in the traditional way, you think of the “cloud” in the same way you think of “virtualization,” and think of moving to the cloud as simply moving existing systems to a more flexible environment. You would be wrong. And you would lead yourself to bad outcomes.

Fundamental Principles of Cloud-Native Design

The cloud-native architecture is founded on a number of principles. Most of these are derived from our experiences over the years with service-oriented architecture (SOA) and the kinds of applications that, through the application of certain enabling technologies, have come to be known as cloud applications. These principles are as follows.

The most transformative of these principles is microservices, which enable us to disassemble monolithic applications. They let us break those large, unwieldy applications into small, independent pieces that serve a business function. Each piece becomes a service that can be developed and deployed on its own.

Another step toward modularity is containerization. With Docker, for example, you can build a container that serves as a mobile instance of, say, a web server. You can put that instance anywhere: on your laptop, a cloud server, or a robot in Antarctica. The instance will run the same way in all those places because the container (with a few caveats) insulates whatever’s going on inside from what’s going on outside, ensuring that environments (and what’s inside ’em) are consistent globally.

CI/CD, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery, is yet another key ingredient in the cloud-native architecture. These practices turn software delivery into a low-risk, liquid process. Testing, deployment, and iteration happen at the rapid, business-demanded rate characteristic of this architecture.

In fact, this is one of several scenarios in which a business demands speed. By building cloud-native apps, a business can feel and respond to change faster.

The Organizational Dimension of Cloud-Native Architecture

Successful adoption of the cloud-native model requires not only technology but also people and processes. This is where the “rubber meets the road” for most enterprises. The work transformations we orchestrated at work were mandatory prerequisites to cloud-native adoption and to the formation of our enterprise. Incumbent work structures wield enormous power in maintaining the status quo.

Transformational leaders face fierce opposition when organizing work in new ways. We used these tactics to execute our cloud-native transformation.

Stop doing work the old way.
Work in new, cloud-native ways.
Use our autonomy to work in ways that our specialized skills enable us to work.

We highlighted the formation of teams that can operate rapidly, make autonomous decisions, and take full responsibility for the services they provide. To achieve this, we dismantled the old divisions between development, operations, and business units. We built a new culture of collaboration, continuous improvement, and urgency.

Navigating Complexity: Lessons from the Trenches

The Hitachi project provided some of my most profound insights into cloud-native architecture. We expanded our microservices ecosystem, and with it expanded our challenges, which went far beyond the technical implementation of the individual bits and pieces, including debugging distributed systems. Debugging became an exercise in counterintuitive, multi-level reasoning.

Coordinating the development of features that spanned multiple services required intricate communication protocols, staying in touch with project teams, for instance. True cloud-native architecture is not just about creating individual services but about building a coherent system that has integrity, is easily understandable, and can be easily operated and maintained. This is the elusive quality that good architects have always called “systemness.”

We achieved it by assembling an architecture team with both deep and wide expertise across a number of critical areas and by attacking those closely coupled areas in a coordinated way, enabling deployment automation (to world-class standards), forming comprehensive test strategies (to ensure correctness), creating a centralized knowledge management system (to aid understanding), and developing a top-notch observability strategy (to ensure that what is whole is also comprehensible).

Future-Proofing in a Dynamic Technological Landscape

Architecture for the cloud is not a destination but a journey of endless adjustment and learning. The organizations that seem to do best develop flexible, by-design, system-integration approaches that permit them to add new technologies to the mix with minimal disruption to system reliability.

This requires more than mere technical know-how. It necessitates a culture of curiosity and continuous learning, and strategic thinking not just among individuals but within teams. Those teams must be good not only at assessing new technologies and at understanding the potential impact those technologies might have on our business, but also at making smart decisions about whether to integrate those technologies into our operations.

Practical Guidance for Cloud-Native Transformation

It’s not an easy ask for organizations to take up that are just starting their cloud-native journey. Moving from plan to action requires not just patience but also strategic thinking and a willingness to question and maybe even upend long-held assumptions.

Start with pilot projects that allow for some low-risk experimentation.
Invest in observability, and then some more, until your cloud-native system is readable to a human. This first key step toward an organization becoming a cloud-native one is about upending old ways of thinking.
Prepare detailed orders that provide solid support and simultaneously incite creativity.
Create conditions under which teams can pretend they are in a kind of safe risk zone, where they can try things, fail, and learn from their failures, so that they can constantly (or at least frequently) re-up a way of achieving their goal that seems to be going on forever.

The cloud-native architecture is an approach to problem-solving, and not just a tech strategy anymore. The competitive advantage you get from being cloud-native comes from the right components of a solution interacting in the right way, which is to say, mostly from being in the cloud. Not all of the solutions offered by the cloud-native architecture are available if you’re stuck “on-prem”.

Summary:

The article explores cloud-native architecture, emphasizing its shift from monolithic applications to microservices, containerization, and CI/CD practices that enable rapid deployment and scaling. It highlights the need for organizational transformation, focusing on autonomy, collaboration, and continuous improvement to successfully implement cloud-native practices. The piece also discusses the challenges of navigating complexity in distributed systems and the importance of a flexible, learning-driven approach to future-proof cloud architectures.