#Cloud Native Architecture
Leveraging Cloud Architecture can accelerate innovation by reducing the time and cost it takes to develop new capabilities and operate at Web scale. However, to leverage the cloud effectively, an organization must think differently about the manner in which it develops, deploys and operates software.
While Cloud vendors such as Amazon and Microsoft provide a wide range of great capabilities, the manner in which these capabilities are used can have a significant impact on the risk factors, agility, and cost of leveraging Cloud architecture.
Most organizations that move to the cloud start by transplanting the practices that they employ in their data centers to the cloud. This is often referred to as a Lift & Shift, Cloud Hosted, or Data Center Transplant strategy. This, however, is a bad practice that is not conducive to success. Our experience has shown that this approach leads to higher TCO: between 200% - 400% higher monthly spending than necessary for development and production.
To truly achieve the full benefits of the cloud, an organization must employ a very different approach that starts with embracing 100% Software Defined Infrastructure, liberating Cloud Native Architecture, and ultimately achieving a Continuous Deployment paradigm that decouples software deployments from feature releases to Customers.
Our experience has shown that adopting Cloud Native Architecture reduces risk by minimizing the time and money spent to deliver business value. This is especially important when creating new product offerings where the need for market validation is essential to determining the appropriate level of investment in the product development activities. By shortening the development cycle significantly, validated learning can be achieved faster and cheaper thereby reducing the level of investment when the market testing necessitates a pivot. On the other hand, when the market testing demonstrates a positive outcome, the Cloud Native Architecture provides built in scalability to accommodate market demand without needing to re-architect the solution for scale.
By leveraging Cloud Native Architecture, we have demonstrated that we can reduce costs by close to 90% while improving software quality, security, and compliance.