The Dark Secret of Cloud Native

Moving applications to the cloud is a big investment and can be mentally taxing as there are many things to figure out to make confident decisions. We have a hands-on focused course that takes you through the most important concepts and techniques that may end up being ingredients in your solution, once you embark on this journey. 

Register here to watch the replay!

Cloud Native Is Great, Right?

It is widely accepted that running application software in the cloud (where running on Kubernetes is a special yet dominant subcase) has many benefits. I’m not going to roll out that entire narrative here since this has been done in a million other articles before. 

Let me say this much: Cloud enables things that weren’t possible before. De-coupling software from hardware makes it possible to independently evolve physical infrastructure and software.

Declarative infrastructure and deployment definition enables user experience (which is what, in the end, makes money) to be developed faster and in smaller, incremental steps. Independent layers of redundancy and fault tolerance enable much more reliable services. Remember when Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram were unavailable for 6 hours a few weeks ago? We kind of forgot, but something like this was completely normal 20 years ago!

Moving things to the cloud, if done right, can also improve the quality of life for developers and operations teams since it enables degrees of automation that weren’t possible before. I’ve heard people discuss that they might even start deploying on Fridays—go figure! 

So What’s The Problem With Cloud Native?

But the dark secret of cloud transformation is that all these benefits don’t come for free—there’s a huge transition cost to pay. New technology needs to be mastered, new thinking paradigms must be understood and applied, and processes must be changed.

How software delivery organizations are structured will change significantly—changing the skills profile for existing roles and creating completely new ones. Take the example of site reliability engineers—that was not a thing a few years ago.

For a certain period of time, it can feel like you’ve just switched from one hell to another. Sometimes it can even feel like everything got worse since, no matter how painful and slow everything was before, it was known.

Once you embark on the journey to the cloud, everything will feel unknown. It takes a special liking to welcome such a significant change in a short time truly. 

Cloud Native is Worth It!

But I guarantee you – and there’s lots of testimony supporting this – it’s all worth it. To give people an idea of the most important challenges a successful cloud native transformation entails, we have created the Accelerate Dev Workflows Academy Class, which I had the pleasure of running for the first time in June 2021.

And the good news is that if you missed it back then, you can find the classroom here and sign up for the live training sessions replay here. 

In the Accelerate Dev Workflows class, I will talk about how to bring inner development loop efficiency back when developing applications for the cloud. We’ll wrap our heads around continuous integration and continuous delivery and take concepts like continuous deployment and GitOps for a spin. We will also test drive application platforms to abstract some of the cloud’s complexity for those parts of an organization that don’t necessarily need to deal with it. 

Like all our Academy Classes, it is entirely free. It consists of four live, seriously demo-heavy training sessions. It provides hands-on challenges for self-paced study and a dedicated classroom space where learners can meet and discuss with their classmates and instructors. I talk in detail about how everything works in the first training session.

In case of questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch! You can DM me here in the community or find me on Twitter or LinkedIn (links are in my community profile). 

Does this sound like your cup of tea? Then reserve your spot today and let them know if you know someone else who would be interested, too!

Check out our free, 4-week Academy class, Accelerate Dev Workloads (on demand now). You’ll learn how to develop cloud native applications easier and faster.