Casey West
Casey is Principal Technologist for the Cloud Foundry team at Pivotal, where he plays with a powerful Open Source cloud platform. He creates healthy communities by advocating cultural and technological change.
The cloud-native future
Moving beyond ad-hoc automation to take advantage of patterns that deliver predictable capabilities.
Can you release new features to your customers every week? Every day? Every hour? Do new developers deploy code on their first day, or even during job interviews? Can you sleep soundly after a new hire’s deployment knowing your applications are all running perfectly fine? A rapid release cadence with the processes, tools, and culture that support the safe and reliable operation of cloud-native applications has become the key strategic factor for software-driven organizations who are shipping software faster with reduced risk. When you are able to release software more rapidly, you get a tighter feedback loop that allows you to respond more effectively to the needs of customers.
Continuous delivery is why software is becoming cloud-native: shipping software faster to reduce the time of your feedback loop. DevOps is how we approach the cultural and technical changes required to fully implement a cloud-native strategy. Microservices is the software architecture pattern used most successfully to expand your development and delivery operations and avoid slow, risky, monolithic deployment strategies. It’s difficult to succeed, for example, with a microservices strategy when you haven’t established a “fail fast” and “automate first” DevOps culture.
Continuous delivery, DevOps, and microservices describe the why, how, and what of being cloud-native. These competitive advantages are quickly becoming the ante to play the software game. In the most advanced expression of these concepts they are intertwined to the point of being inseparable. This is what it means to be cloud-native.