The phrase “cloud-native” has become overrated in today’s tech scene. Every familiar enterprise technology product is now rebranded as “cloud-native” and is offered as a containerized workload for today’s business needs. But are they really “cloud-native” ? To answer this question we have to deeply understand the cloud native qualities. Can our existing enterprise monoliths become cloud native or use cloud native tools ? is it worthwhile to break down the monolith as today’s advice goes ?
This deck focuses on those hard questions in today’s enterprise landscape. This is a discussion with enterprise architects on the challenges they face in their cloud native journey.
2. I want to be “Cloud Native”
https://www.appivo.com/2018-technology-predictions-part-3/
3. But what I really want is...
● To be API driven & discoverable
● To have a platform mindset - how to get customers, partners involved in one
single platform
● To be less worried about leasing infrastructure - private cloud / hybrid cloud
● To care deeply about business process optimization with software & technology -
Build vs (Buy, Subscribe, Rent)
● To be highly sensitive to infrastructure costs & how to optimize - Pay per use only
● To prioritize on business continuity and availability
● To care about developer productivity and autonomy
5. How are they doing it ?
● Teams are becoming smaller; optimizing for their expertise & productivity
● Building a platform becomes a multi-team activity
● Multiple teams work in harmony when there are contracts (Declarative APIs)
for integration
● Developers shy away from monoliths that’s not resilient, manageable or
observable
6. What do they yearn for..
● Smart endpoints and dumb pipes
○ Autonomous & expert teams build smart endpoints
● Integration agility is not achieved through “Centers of excellence”
● Integrations are locally (by the teams) owned, distributed and conforms to
Postel's law
● Development time is spent on part business logic development and part
integration
8. Where does developers spend most of their time
- Handling integration logic
- In a “smart endpoint” environment, the developer is responsible in handling
the complexities of the distributed system - Programming the smarts
- Implementing middleware in code and configuring the infrastructure (proxies
and sidecars)
- Breaking down the monolith - Refactoring and rewriting
9. What's so different about cloud native integrations
● Integrations that's traditionally handled by middleware now written with
code
● Understanding the complexity of the distributed system is relied on the
developer
● Distributed, specialized, immutable and scenario driven
● Higher focus on resilience, fault tolerance and auto recovery
● Part of a larger services ecosystem
● Combined with robust automation
10. Greenfields are patches in a brownfield
● There are no “Greenfield” enterprises
● “Lift and shift” is not a cloud native strategy
● Breaking down the monolith is expensive and not always an
option
● Cloud native integration patterns help to bridge the gap
○ Anti-corruption / CQRS / Event sourcing / Materialized view pattern /
Sidecar
11. Cloud native development enablers
● Cloud is less threatening
○ Public clouds are extending a virtual network to the private data centers
○ Kubernetes is creating an abstraction on infrastructure making applications run
multi-cloud
● Tools - Plethora of tools in CNCF landscape
○ i.e: Service Mesh manages and observe the exploration of point-to-point
microservices communication
● Programming languages
○ Languages like Ballerina focusing on the distributed system and cloud native
deployments
12. WSO2’s vision towards a cloud native enterprise
● WSO2 Enterprise Integrator
○ Config driven decentralized integration - micro-integrator
○ Code driven decentralized integration - Ballerina based integration
○ Streams integration - Siddhi based streaming integration
● Enterprise Integrator Matrix (Micro Integrator = MI, Ballerina Integrator - BI, Streams Integrator - SI)
Distributed Centralized
Configuration driven MI MI
Code driven BI BI (!)
Visual representation MI, BI, SI MI, BI (!), SI
13. WSO2’s vision towards a cloud native enterprise
● WSO2 API Manager
○ Distributed side-car ready
gateway
○ Microservices & API security
○ API marketplace
○ Business KPIs and observability
14. WSO2’s vision towards a cloud native enterprise
● WSO2 Identity & Access Manager
○ Microservices & API security
○ Federation & identity management
○ Customer identity integration &
management
15. In summary
- All enterprises want to be cloud native, what they really expect is to
modernize, to be agile and more productive in usage based economics.
- Loosely coupled, composable enterprise teams yearn from integration agility
- Developers spend more time on handling integration complexity
- There is no greenfield enterprise
- WSO2’s vision towards a cloud native enterprise