- Every business faces unique challenges, and blindly copying another company’s Cloud Native approach is like wearing someone else’s prescription glasses.
At software conferences or tech meetups, the term ‘Cloud Native’ is thrown around like confetti. Along with it comes an avalanche of buzzwords: containers, orchestration, microservices.
But what does it all really mean for your business? Let’s cut through the jargon and explore why Cloud Native has become such a hot topic – and more importantly, whether it’s right for you.
What is Cloud Native?
Cloud native represents a complete rethink of how we create and manage software.
Traditionally, the safest path was to move slowly and carefully. This was a reflection of traditional technology – in-house servers that needed configuring and managing. Making changes was a big risk and required lots of testing and redundancies before going live, leading to slow and cautious changes.
Cloud Native turns this on its head: instead of taking big, careful steps, it allows for lots of small, quick steps that can easily be reversed if something goes wrong.
A new feature can be tested on the current platform and, if successful, pushed live instantly. If anything stops working, you can quickly reverse the change.
What are the benefits of Cloud Native?
Think of Cloud Native computing as offering three main superpowers: speed, scale, and margin.
- Speed
Remember when getting a new feature into production meant months of planning, testing, and nail-biting deployments? Cloud Native can shrink that timeline dramatically – we’re talking days or even hours instead of months. Imagine being able to test new ideas quickly, learn from real user feedback, and adapt on the fly. It’s not about throwing caution to the wind; it’s about making changes that are small and controllable to reduce risk.
- Scale
Growing pains are real in business, especially when it comes to technology. One day you’re handling a few hundred users, the next day your product takes off, and suddenly your servers are handling requests from millions of users, on different devices, around the world. It’s like moving from hosting a dinner party to running an international restaurant chain overnight – you need to serve more customers, in different time zones, with different needs, all while maintaining the same quality of service.
Cloud Native architecture is built for exactly these moments. As your user base expands across different regions, devices, and use cases, Cloud Native lets you scale not just in size, but in complexity. You can handle more users, serve new geographic regions, support different devices, and add new features – all while maintaining (or even improving) performance and reliability.
- Margin
Here’s where things get interesting for the finance folks. Instead of using your capital expenditure (CapEx) to buy enough servers to handle Black Friday-level traffic all year round, Cloud Native lets you use your operational expenditure (OpEx) to scale up when you need it and scale down when you don’t. It’s like having a magical office that expands during busy periods and shrinks during quiet times – and you only pay for the space you actually use.
How to Achieve Cloud Native?
Cloud Native is all about five architectural principles:
1. You need infrastructure that can grow and shrink on demand.
2. Break your application into smaller, independent pieces (microservices).
3. If you can automate a thing, automate it.
4. Package your applications with everything they need to run independently (containerise). This means that wherever you deploy it anywhere (from a developer’s laptop to a production server in another country), it runs exactly the same way.
5. Use tools to manage all these moving parts automatically (orchestrate), allowing you to move away from individual servers.
Why apply Cloud Native to your business?
Here’s the million-dollar question and the bit that trips up most cloud transformation projects. The biggest reason Cloud Native projects fail isn’t the technology or expertise – it’s the misdiagnosis of problems (or worse, not identifying any specific problem at all).
It’s tempting to look at successful companies like Netflix or Amazon and think, “We’ll just do what they did!” But here’s the truth: every business faces unique challenges, and blindly copying another company’s Cloud Native approach is like wearing someone else’s prescription glasses. Sure, they work brilliantly for them, but they might just give you a headache.
The key is to start with your specific business challenges. Are you losing market share because competitors can deploy new features faster? Are your infrastructure costs spiralling out of control?
Are you struggling to expand into new markets because your systems won’t scale? These are the kinds of concrete problems that Cloud Native can help solve, but only if you identify them clearly first.
Making it work: The problem-solution roadmap
Before jumping into Cloud Native, ask yourself these critical questions:
What specific problems are holding you back right now?
Don’t say “we need to be more agile” – dig deeper. What’s actually causing pain in your business?
Which problems would deliver the most value if solved?
Not all problems are equal. Which ones are costing you money, customers, or opportunities?
How will you measure success?
If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Define concrete metrics tied to your specific problems.
What’s the smallest step you can take?
Cloud Native isn’t all-or-nothing. Start with a single service or application that addresses a specific problem.
Remember: The most successful Cloud Native transformations aren’t the ones with the most sophisticated technology ─ they’re the ones that solve real business problems. Start there, and let the solutions guide your technical choices, not the other way around.
- Jamie Dobson is the founder of Container Solutions, and has been helping companies, across industries, move to Cloud Native ways of working for over ten years. Container Solutions develops a strategy, a clear plan and step-by-step implementation helping companies achieve a smooth digital transformation. With services including Internal Developer Platform Enablement, Cloud Modernisation, DevOps/DevSecOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Consultancy, Cloud Optimisation and creating a full Cloud Native Strategy, companies get much more than just engineering know-how. Jamie is also the author of the new book, ‘The Cloud Native Attitude’. https://www.container-solutions.com/