Want to go Cloud or Digital Native? You’ll Need to Make These Six Key Investments…

The ability for an enterprise to become a Cloud Native (CN) or Digitally Native (DN) business implies the need to develop a host of technology capabilities and cultural practices in support of two goals. First, IT becomes aligned with & responsive to the business. Second, IT leads the charge on inculcating a culture of constant business innovation. Given these realities, large & complex enterprises that have invested into DN capabilities often struggle to identify the highest priority areas to target across lines of business or in shared services. In this post, I want to argue that there are six fundamental capabilities large enterprises need to adopt housewide in order to revamp legacy systems. 

Introduction..

The blog has discussed a range of digital applications and platforms at depth. We have covered a range of line of business use cases & architectures – ranging from Customer Journeys, Customer 360, Fraud Detection, Compliance, Risk Management, CRM systems etc. While the specific details will vary from industry to industry, the common themes to all these implementations include a seamless ability to work across multiple channels, to predictively anticipate client needs and support business models in real-time. In short, these are all Digital requirements which have been proven in the webscale world with Google, Facebook, Amazon and Netflix et al.  Most traditional companies are realizing that the adopting the practices of these pioneering enterprises are a must for them to survive and thrive.

However, the vast majority of Fortune 500 enterprises need to overcome significant challenges in their migrating their legacy architecture stacks to a Cloud Native mode.  While it is very easy to slap mobile UIs via static HTML on existing legacy systems, without a re-engineering of their core, they can never realize the true value of digital projects. The end goal of such initiatives is to ensure that underlying systems are agile and able to be responsive to business requirements. The key question then becomes how to develop and scale these capabilities across massive organizations.

Legacy Monolithic IT as a Digital Disabler…

From a top-down direction, business leadership is requesting agiler IT delivery and faster development mechanisms to deal with competitive pressures such as social media streams, a growing number of channels, disruptive competitors and demanding millennial consumers. When one compares the Cloud Native (CN) model (@ http://www.vamsitalkstech.com/?p=5632) to the earlier monolithic deployment stack (@ http://www.vamsitalkstech.com/?p=5617), it is easily noticeable that there are a sheer number of technical elements and trends that enterprise IT is being forced to devise strategies for.

This pressure is being applied on Enterprise IT from both directions.

Let me explain…

In most organizations, the process of identifying the correct set of IT capabilities needed for line of business projects looks like the below –

1. Lines of business leadership works with product management teams to request IT for new projects to satisfy business needs either in support of new business initiatives or to revamp existing offerings
2. IT teams follow a structured process to identify the appropriate (siloed) technology elements to create the solution
3. Development teams follow a mix of agile and waterfall models to stand up the solution which then gets deployed and managed by an operations team
4. Customer needs and update requests get slowly reflected causing customer dissatisfaction
   Given this reality, how can legacy systems and architectures reinvent themselves to become Cloud Native?

Complexity is inevitable & Enterprises that master complexity will win…

The correct way to creating a CN/DN architecture is that certain technology investments need to be made by complex organizations to speed up each step of the above process. The key challenge in the CN process is to help incumbent enterprises kickstart their digital products to disarm competition.

The sheer number of offerings of the digital IT challenge is due in large part to a large number of technology trends and developments that have begun to have a demonstrable impact on IT architectures today. There are no fewer than nine—including social media and mobile technology, the Internet of Things (IoT), open ecosystems, big data and advanced analytics, and cloud computing et al.

Thus, the CN movement is a complex mishmash of technologies that straddle infrastructure, storage, compute and management. This is an obstacle that must be surmounted by enterprise architects and IT leadership to be able to best position their enterprise for the transformation that must occur.

Six Foundational Technology Investments to go Cloud Native…

There are six foundational technology investments that predicate the creation of a Cloud Native Application Architecture – IaaS, PaaS & Containers, Container Orchestration, Data Analytics & BPM, API Management & DevOps.

There are six layers that large enterprises will need to focus on to improve their systems, processes, and applications in order to achieve a Digital Native architecture. These investments can proceed in parallel.

#1 First and foremost, you will need an IaaS platform –

An agile IaaS is an organization-wide foundational layer which provides unlimited capacity across a range of infrastructure services – compute, network, storage, and management. IaaS provides an agile but scalable foundation to deploy everything else on it without incurring undue complexity in development, deployment & management. Key tenets of the private cloud approach include better resource utilization, self-service provisioning and a high degree of automation. Core IT processes such as the lifecycle of resource provisioning, deployment management, change management and monitoring will need to be redone for an enterprise-grade IaaS platform such as OpenStack.

#2 You will need to adopt a PaaS layer with Containers at its heart  –

Containers are possibly the first infrastructure software category created by developers in mind. The prominence of Linux Containers has Docker coincided with the onset of agile development practices under the DevOps umbrella – CI/CD etc. Containers are an excellent choice to create agile delivery pipelines and continuous deployment. It is a very safe bet to make that in a few years, the majority of digital applications (or mundane applications for that matter) will transition to hundreds of services deployed on and running on containers.

Adopting a market leading Platform As A Service (PaaS) platform such as Red Hat’s OpenShift or CloudFoundry can provide a range of benefits from helping with container adoption, tools to help with CI/CD process, reliable rollout with A/B testing, Green-Blue deployments. A PaaS such as OpenShift adds auto-scaling, failover & other kinds of infrastructure management.

Why Linux Containers and Docker are the Runtime for the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC)..(4/7)

#3 You will need an Orchestration layer for Containers –

At their core, Containers enable the creation of multiple self-contained execution environments over the same operating system. However, containers are not enough in and of themselves – to drive large-scale DN applications. An Orchestration layer at a minimum, organizes groups of containers into applications, schedules them on servers that match their resource requirements, places the containers on complex network topology etc. It also helps with complex tasks such as release management, Canary releases and administration. The actual tipping point for large-scale container adoption will vary from enterprise to enterprise. However, the common precursor to supporting containerized applications at scale has to be an enterprise-grade management and orchestration platform. Again, a PaaS technology such as OpenShift provides two benefits in one – a native container model and orchestration using Kubernetes.

Kubernetes – Container Orchestration for the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC)..(5/7)

#4 Accelerate investments in and combine Big Data Analytics and BPM engines –

In the end, the ability to drive business processes is what makes an agile enterprise. Automation in terms of both Business Processes (BPM) and Data Driven decision making are proven approaches used at webscale,  data-driven organizations. This makes all the difference in terms of what is perceived to be a digital enterprise. Accordingly, the ability to tie in a range of front, mid and back-office processes such as Customer Onboarding, Claims Management & Fraud Detection to a BPM-based system and allowing applications to access these via a loosely coupled architecture based on microservices is key. Additionally leveraging Big Data architectures to process data streams in near real-time is another key capability to possess.

Why Big Data Analytics is the Future of CRM..

#5 Invest in APIs –

APIs enable companies to constantly churn out innovative offerings while still continuously adapting & learning from customer feedback. Internet-scale companies such as Facebook provide edge APIs that enable thousands of companies to write applications that drives greater customer volumes to the Facebook platform. The term API Economy is increasingly in vogue and it connotes a loosely federated ecosystem of companies, consumers, business models and channels

APIs are used to abstract out the internals of complex underlying platform services. Application Developers and other infrastructure services can be leveraged well defined APIs to interact with Digital platforms. These APIs enable the provisioning, deployment, and management of platform services.

Applications developed for a Digital infrastructure will be developed as small, nimble processes that communicate via APIs and over traditional infrastructure such as service mediation components (e.g Apache Camel). These microservices based applications will offer huge operational and development advantages over legacy applications. While one does not expect legacy but critical applications that still run on mainframes (e.g. Core Banking, Customer Order Processing etc) to move over to a microservices model anytime soon, customer-facing applications that need responsive digital UIs will definitely move.

A Reference Architecture for The Open Banking Standard..

#6 Be prepared, your development methodologies will gradually evolve to DevOps – 

The key non-technology component that is involved in delivering error-free and adaptive software is DevOps.  Currently, most traditional application development and IT operations happen in silos. DevOps with its focus on CI/CD practices requires engineers to communicate more closely, release more frequently, deploy & automate daily, reduce deployment failures and mean time to recover from failures.

Typical software development life cycles that require lengthy validations and quality control testing prior to deployment can stifle innovation. Agile software process, which is adaptive and is rooted in evolutionary development and continuous improvement, can be combined with DevOps. DevOps focuses on tight integration between developers and teams who deploy and run IT operations. DevOps is the only development methodology to drive large-scale Digital application development.

Conclusion..

By following a transformation roughly outlined as above, the vast majority of enterprises can derive a tremendous amount of value in their Digital initiatives. However, the current industry approach as in vogue – to treat Digital projects as a one-off, tactical project investments – does not simply work or scale anymore. There are various organizational models that one could employ from the standpoint of developing analytical maturity. These ranging from a shared service to a line of business led approach. An approach that I have seen work very well is to build a Digital Center of Excellence (COE) to create contextual capabilities, best practices and rollout strategies across the larger organization. The COE should be at the forefront of pushing the above technology boundaries within the larger framework of the organization.