Finding Velocity: Highlights of ‘Cloud Native Evolution’
Aug 27, 2017 by Armory
When executives at global companies ask me for the best primer to quickly get up to speed on how to compete in a software-first world, I point them to Cloud-Native Evolution , a free 70 page e-book by O’Reilly.
How Companies Go Digital: We highly recommend O’Reilly’s free PDF e-Book about migrating toward cloud-native technologies and practices by shifting from monolithic onsite architectures to applications designed solely to operate on cloud computing platforms. Also includes case studies from Capital One and other companies making this transition.
Here are screenshots from my favorite parts of the book, along with some additional detail filled in:
Companies that learn how to effectively make software a core competency are better positioned to respond to market needs, innovate faster, and create high margin lines of business.
For example, when we started Armory, we were responding to having fixed this problem ourselves at our previous company.
The “two pizza team” concept of de-centralizing teams lets companies combine more nimble cloud deployment infrastructure with the ability to produce output faster.
94% of companies surveyed for the book are moving to public, hybrid or private clouds in the next five years.
While “Lift & Shift” is a good staring point, it’s important to evolve past that to fully leverage the cloud.
Moving applications to the cloud often requires retrofitting them to enable deployments in a modern, fully immutable fashion. Armory helps companies through this process.
Enabling Continuous Integration, Delivery (and Continuous Deployments through further automation) of software form the bedrock of cloud-native evolution.
Breaking monolith apps up into microservices signifies an evolution of maturity in the cloud.
Allowing teams to deploy their parts of an application on the cadence that’s right for them is a huge benefit of moving to microservices.
This is the most important part of the book from an organizational structure and culture perspective. Companies create systems that mimic their structure. Meaning, it’s hard or impossible to move from monolith apps to microservices without also instituting the decentralization found in “two pizza teams”. The organization must evolve to enable the system to evolve.
Armory takes “blue/green” deployments a step further with Barometer, our automated canary analysis engine.
What Stage are You In? Read our Stages of Software Delivery Evolution Infographic to understand which software delivery stage your company currently falls into.
