Guest post originally published on Mia-Platform’s blog by Mia-Platform Team
In this current moment of market change and digital business transformation, the trends in the cloud-native world confirm the interest of companies in the renewal of the application portfolio. Thanks to cloud infrastructures and cloud-native applications, companies not only get the resources they need to ensure a faster time-to-market of new projects, and with an as-a-service mode, but they are also able to integrate applications more easily, both with each other and with third-party software and services. With cloud-native applications it becomes easier to create, disassemble and reassemble, as a Lego, digital supports and functionalities to reuse them in new contexts, saving money and development time. It thus becomes faster to integrate the advanced “as-a-service” functions offered by cloud providers and the launch of new collaborations with partners and customers faster, taking advantage of the supremacy of an interconnected digital infrastructure.
Analysts forecast the top cloud trends
According to the Cloud Transformation Observatory of the Politecnico di Milano School of Management, this year the Italian cloud market will reach 3.84 billion euros compared to 3.32 billion the previous year, confirming the strategic importance of cloud services both in public and private in corporate IT. The average investment threshold in the cloud is now only 10 percentage points from what was spent in traditional IT systems. Cloud services have become the primary choice for finding resources for new projects, without having to make capital investments or having to deal with managing capacity planning, configurations, maintenance, fault tolerance, systems scalability, and infrastructural security.
The 4 emerging cloud-native trends, according to Gartner
Gartner now gives great strategic importance to the modernization of cloud-native logic applications. In the recent report “Emerging Technologies: Kubernetes and the Battle for Cloud-Native Infrastructure”, the research company identifies cloud-native platforms as the keys to accelerating the adoption of the cloud, modern software management methodologies and infrastructure.
Among the fundamental trends that accompany the cloud-native developments outlined within the Gartner research, we will mention below the most relevant:
1. Serverless computing & containers
Among the types of IaaS, SaaS, Paas services available in the cloud, Gartner analysts foresee the development of serverless computing in particular, i.e. function-as-a-service (FaaS). For example, you can find the following shared services: authentication, database, integration etc. Services that are “consumed on demand” by other applications or microservices, without engaging servers or having fixed costs.
FaaS services complement software in containers, to offer scalability for variable or difficult-to-predict workloads, such as those generated by the new customer-facing self-service services.
2. Multicloud & distributed cloud
Another significant trend is the adoption of multicloud (or distributed cloud): information architectures that allow the use of the infrastructures of multiple cloud providers at the same time, to reconcile best-of-breed needs with performance and regulatory compliance needs. A method that combines the benefits of the public cloud with the company’s ability to maintain governance of the infrastructure; in addition, you can decide the location of the individual services and data archives, leaving the IT technical management to the providers alone.
3. Composable application / enterprise
According to Gartner, the company of the future will have to free itself from the rigid divisional barriers that today are not compatible with the flexibility of organizations, reflecting on the IT front with the subdivision of applications and data into silos. With the terms of composable enterprise / composable applications, there will be a more modern software design and organization model, which will allow you to quickly create and dispose of the features in use, according to specific business needs.
4. Low code / no code
The key to being able to modernize organizations and evolve application support towards the composable applications paradigm is to enable the lines of business to collaborate with IT as much as possible in the design of cloud-native solutions. This is possible through the more extensive use of low-code or no-code tools, which can also be used by people who do not have specific programming skills.
An already established trend: the role of the Kubernetes orchestrator in the cloud-native world.
On the IT operations front, analysts have no doubts. The cloud-native world will be supported by Kubernetes, the open-source orchestrator that has emerged in recent years as the de facto standard for managing the most complex container-based business application environments. According to Gartner, by 2025 85% of companies will have software in container production and will use this mode for at least 15% of the application park. Kubernetes will therefore act as orchestrator in supporting the different deployment models adopted in mixed information ecosystems, where traditional infrastructures and cloud service providers will coexist.
In summary
The cloud-native strategy proposes a truly effective model to modernize IT and make business innovation through the native integration of applications with the features available in the cloud, for example, to analyze big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML / AI), to interpret voice and images, for collaboration and so on.
Adopting a portfolio of cloud-native applications means being ready to welcome future developments in cloud services, being able to move from simple users to digital service providers, to the benefit of the entire ecosystem of partners and customers.
It therefore means opening the doors to the opportunities of the future digital business.