Chapter 12. What's Next? Cloud Native Application Architecture Trends

In the previous chapters, we learned about multiple different aspects, starting from the core definition of the Cloud Native Maturity Model (CNMM), then peeling back different layers, and finally trying out various cloud providers hands-on. In this chapter, we are going to focus on a bunch of newer things, including looking at the future and talking about a few predictions!

Here are some of the areas we will focus on:

• Top seven predictions for the next three years – what to expect in terms of the evolution of cloud native architectures
• The future of enterprises on the cloud
• New IT roles that will possibly evolve (such as an AI Officer)

These topics will help you learn the following skills:

• Understanding the trends to future-proof your strategies and architectures
• Areas of growth and evolution in your personal career

So, let's dive right in!

Predictions for the next three years – what to expect in terms of cloud native architecture evolution

Although the cloud has already become mainstream for all types of applications and use cases, if we look at the overall market potential, it's still in its very early stages. That, coupled with the trends and advancements we are seeing, let's look at the top seven predictions that will promote the cloud native adoption in the coming three years.

Open source frameworks and platforms

Many customers are worried about lock-in aspects in the public cloud. However, this fear is totally unfounded as every piece of software and application has some vendor-specific intellectual aspects which provide value to the customer, so they shouldn't just be viewed from a lock-in perspective. As an example, for, say, word processing, many of the customers make use of Microsoft Word, so if you use that to create a document, in a way you are tied to the application, but that doesn't imply that you are locked in...

The future of enterprises on the cloud

Enterprises are always risk averse and so have always been slow-movers in any technology patterns. The cloud is no different in that respect, as for many years, the enterprises were watching the progress, sitting on the side-lines and waiting for others to be first-movers. It was at the same time that we saw a huge surge of many new start-ups that were all using the cloud and slowly started to disrupt the mainstream, well-established enterprises. As examples, Lyft and Uber challenged the taxi/transportation business, Airbnb disrupted the hospitality industry, and likewise Oscar Insurance radically changed the health insurance sector. These types of successes were never easier earlier, but now with the cloud, everyone has access to same set of services and infrastructure resources which they can scale up/down based on their business needs... and this changes the playing field for everyone.

As a result of the aforementioned effect, many enterprises have...

New IT roles

One of the long-term impacts of the cloud permeating enterprises is that there are multiple new roles which have evolved. Some of these are already mainstream, whereas with evolving technology trends, some of them are starting to become more popular:

• Chief Technology & Innovation Officer (CTIO): Earlier, organizations had either a CTO or a CIO, but nowadays due to increased focus on innovation, mainly powered by the cloud, a new role of CTIO has started to appear.
• Cloud Solutions Architect: Earlier, we used to have Application Architects, System Architects, Integration Architects, and so on, however with the possibilities that have opened up with cloud native architectures, a new role of Cloud Solutions architect has become very popular.
• Cloud Migration Architect: As many of enterprises have a huge amount of technical debt which they have to remove to effectively leverage the cloud, a new migration focused on the Cloud Migrations Architect role has started to appear off late...

Summary

This brings us to the last section of this book, and we have covered lots of ground right from the beginning. So, let's go back a bit and reflect on what we have learned through, the various chapters.

We started by defining what it actually means to be cloud native, as that was the core part of laying the foundation of the entire discussion in the rest of the chapters. So, as a quick refresher, the CNMM revolves around three main axes:

• Cloud Native Service
• Application Centric Designs
• Automation

 

 

So, every customer will have a varying degree of maturity of across all of these axes, but essentially, they can still be cloud native:

After this, we went into the details of the Cloud Adoption Framework and what it means from multiple different perspectives, including business, people, governance, platform, security, and operations. This eventually led us to the next important set of topics revolving around the essence of microservices, serverless, and how to build applications in the cloud...