Uphill and Downhill With Cloud-Native Technologies: Navigating the Terrain of Transformation | Cloud Native Now 2023

Hello and welcome to Cloudnative now at Techstrong Group Cloudnative conference. I'm excited to be here and thank you very much for the opportunity to share my experiences and learnings with you folks. My topic for today is uphill downhill with cloud native technologies, navigating the terrain of the transformation.

My name is Bmk HB R Island. I am a transformation architect with Section six based out of New Zealand. In today's rapidly evolving technology landscape, the adoption of the cloud data technologies have moved beyond a choice to a crucial necessity for organization across the globe.

The promise of the flexibility, the scalability, the resilience, have driven this transition still. The journey towards complete cloud native adoption often reveals a multitude of hurdles and challenges that must be navigated. In the session.

I will take all you through a journey, a fascinating journey titled Uphill and Downhill with Cloud Native Technologies. We'll explore the peaks and values of the transformation as we tackle the principles of cloud native computing, the pivotal role of our open source software in this arena, and the benefits of containerization and orchestration. We will begin with the uphill portion and then we will go to the peak, the summit, and then we will go down the downhill to understand the benefits of this.

When we talk about uphill, there are number of challenges including learning curves, architectural shift, critical challenges, cetera. The same way when we talk about downhill, the benefits that you start realizing, we will unravel how these technologies can transform the software delivery, the business facility, and how an org, how organization can get benefit out of it. Now let's look at my agenda.

You have the number one, the uphill client, the challenges and cloudnative adoption. Number two, the summit, the principles of cloudnative technologies. Number three, the downhill journey, the benefits and opportunities, and number four, navigating the terrain, the tools and best practices and what as an organization you do it's, it's kind of a presentation.

It's not too technically deep. Uh, yeah, I'm not sharing any AML code. I'm not showing your Kubernetes cluster or is the service meh, but I'm giving you as an developer and engineer what have gone through in understanding this and how in my previous experiences we have adopted to this cloud native technologies.

In my current role, I help organizations to understand the peaks and values of the cloud native terrain and the landscape. Let's talk about that. Today, we embark on a journey through the very terrain of cloud native technology, exploring both challenging claims and the rewarding distance.

I'm thrilled to share my experience here. We'll talk about uphill summit downhill and the tools and best practices. The uphill portion has few things to cover.

One is the changing landscape. Let's understand that what is happening with the traditional IT and what's happening, what happened 10 years before and what's happening now and where we are going ahead. The complexity involves and also the key challenges, the learning curve that we have, the steep learning curve.

In fact, we have the architectural shift, the distributed systems and security, the cultural shift that we needed in the organization. When we talk about the changing IT landscape, the change is the one constant. We live in a time where business demand flexibility, they demand scalability, they demand resiliency to meet ever evolving market needs and customer expectations.

It's no longer somebody saying that I don't need any of this, you know, because your business as of today, it demands whether you are a small shop, you know, helping, you know, retail, e-commerce and a webscale system, even booking movie theaters or even like your, uh, travel assistant apps. All they use one kind of other technologies and they need the speed. They need the flexibility, they need that scalability.

You know, as the demand grows and shrinks down, you need the elasticity to help you out with this. The change in the landscape is also, it's actually your wake up call for some of the organization, like you know, where your traditional IT model, including your methodologies that you have operated, your infrastructure, your software development practices, and your security practices and your deployment practices, your release practices, all this are changing and it's shifting towards the cloud native technologies. So the shortcoming of your traditional IT structures, including your organizational design, including your choice of tools, including your choice of methodologies and frameworks that you adopt, and all these needs actually a change in order to adapt to your the cloud native technologies, and it has become less of an option and more of a crucial necessity.

Today, we will dwell into why this is the case and how these technologies can give organization a competitive edge in our fast paced digital economy. There is also a complexity and key challenges and steep learning curve involved in this. The shift towards cloud native technology is not just buying a tool and then deploying your organization, and then you can say, hands off, okay, I'm ready to go through this journey.

No, it's not that easy. It introduces us to new tools, new techniques that require a distinct mindset from a traditional approaches, understanding distributed systems, containerization, microservices, orchestrations can be challenging. However, with a planned learning path and a cultural shift that encourages the learning, these challenges can be transformed into a rewarding knowledge growth.

Same thing happened to me, you know, seven, eight years before when I started, you know, there was a steep learning curve of understanding these kind of technical, uh, technology platforms, tooling associated with it and architectural changes. The road to cloud native is not without its bumps. Challenges can include understanding complex distributed systems, ensuring security in your cloud environment, managing operational challenges, resource utilization, cost management and DevOps culture.

Navigating these challenges can be tough back with the right strategies that are surmountable. Remember, every challenge is an opportunity for learning and growth as we move forward. We also have, yes, architectural shift in our architecture, design and delivery of softwares.

It is all interconnected. Adopting cloud native technology is not just about learning new tools. It is all also shifting, embracing the architectural practices in your organization.

Traditionally, we have built a two tier system or a three tiers system, and there is a monolith system, so we deploy on a big virtual missions or a physical server. We have a massive single schema database. We have seen all these.

Now, if you want the speed and agility and you want the fluid ity, and then you need to change your architectural practices, shifting from monoliths to microservice, serverless, fixed to the fluid, fluid and also from a rigid scaling where you waited for your, your infrastructure team to provision your additional servers that you need or additional compute you need, or additional stories that you require. Now, you waited for months to make that happen, but now it's all happening just like that. The shift can be daunting, but there's a key part of our helpful journey.

I have to say this, you know, this is something, yeah, paradigm shift for architects and engineers who have traditionally return a big moral systems and coming into this new world. It sets the foundation upon which cloud native applications can be built, deployed, and operated, and it's very important to understand that architecture makes a significant shift in embracing cloud native technologies. Let's move on to the next challenges you have.

Number of security related challenges when you adopt to cloud native technologies. Okay, now, when we say security, traditionally we always thought about security as an afterthought in our organization, where some of the designs will go through the security review as part of your architecture review committees or design review committees, and you have security consultants working with you to see, but now everything is shifting left. You have application security to consider, or you call AppSec and you need to consider the network security, your topology, how these things are configured, how these things are deployed.

Now, how is your hybrid cloud, your public cloud, your on-prem, and there is also data security associated with that, and you are no longer, you know, uh, saying that anything and everything is within my network, so I am all good to go. No, because there are, as we see today, that every day the headlines one way or other, some companies are compromised and there is a data breach. There are new regulations, there are no new compliance requirements, so you need to be really mindful about that.

You know, the data security is an integral part of this overall picture. The same way, the identity and authorization, the authentication system, monitoring the anomalies and having tools to identify threats because you are talking about webscale systems, it's no longer a single machine physical or a virtual where you can sit and ibar. You need softwares and tools to help you to do this third direction and then remediating those issues.

You need to introduce secure software development practices like DevSecOps and right from your, your, you start to write code, your, you know, security analysis, dynamic testing associated with the threat deductions, software composers and analysis. So you need whole set of changes and challenges, you know, that involved in learning all these practices and implementing a successful cloud native adoption in your organization. Now, these are the uphill part of your things, but you need to also look at as you climb up the hill, there are principles of cloud native technologies, containerization, microservices, serverless applications, orchestration and continuous delivery, and the role of open source software, containerization and microservices is no longer a new term for us.

We have been hearing this for at least for the last decade or so. Let's talk about containerization and microservices. These are the two crucial building blocks of cloud native technologies.

Containerization reference to the practice of encapsulating our packaging of software code, all its dependencies so that it can run uniformly, inconsistently on any infrastructure. This ensures that the software always runs the same regardless of its environment. There have been some great standardization, adoption and flexibility and portability.

Those days were gone where your application can run on one specific set of environment. It can run only on the particular mission, and we all remember that we used to name the servers and it's like our pits. We have named the servers, so by the way, we know that what we mean when we say the server, but today everything is dynamic.

Things are changing. There is a pod running here, there is a pod running there, and it can go down and come up at any time. Microservices, on the other hand, is an architectural style and adoption.

How an application, a collection of loosely coupled services in microservice architecture service are fine grained and the protocol are lightweight. These architectural style allows the country's delivery and deployment of large complex applications. As I present today, using the browser, using this video platform, you might see that there may be an updates happening behind the scene to my browser.

There may be an update happening to the video platform that you're using, and these are happening seamlessly without any disruption. We talk about, uh, you know, deployment happening. 11 seconds, two seconds, 20 seconds.

We have seen all these metricses shared by number of organization, you know, in in, in the technology space. How is that made possible when you have a big moral system? Making a change in deploying to a production takes ages.

You need to wait for six months or three months of release cycle, and you need to coordinate with the different teams. You need to coordinate and do a big release cycle planning process, but with microservices and a click off button as you commit the code goes through your testing, goes through your security scanning, and then get validated and get deployed, and the changes when you do incremental changes in a distributed system, it gives you great flexibility in terms of innovating, introducing new features, applying security patches, addressing risk related things, or when there's a threat, then you will be able to also remediate that and address that. The architectural standard of microservice also allows the country's delivery and deployment of large systems.

So it is important to understand that the is a reason why I was emphasizing that your architectural shifting conti the cloud native technologies is an important aspect of it. As we move on to the orchestration and countries delivery orchestration is automated configuration management and coordination of computer system, application and services. In the current of the cloud native technologies orchestration often reverse to the management of life cycle of containers, especially in a large dynamic environments.

Now, we have seen some metrics from Google and other organizations sharing that, like now, they used to run billions of containers and even a small footprint of container tech technology deployed in a small medium enterprise organization can have 4,000, 5,000 parts running. Are containers running at any given point of time? I'm talking about like the taking off time, like, you know, I mean you take off with cloud native technologies and orchestration platforms for your containers.

That could be the case. Continuous delivery is a key principle in agile methodologies is the practice of keeping your code base always at a deployable state. It ensures that every change to your system is releasable as and when that you need and you can deliver the updates to your customer quickly and in a sustainable pace.

Now, those days were gone where when you want the release to happen and the team needs to work through three months to four months to prepare for the release to happen, the organization who were used to deploy once in a year, once in six months, now slowly start adopting the continuous delivery practice is the reason, because this is the way that you can innovate quickly, deploy changes quickly, and deliver value to your customers, whether it's internal or at external. The important aspect of this cloud native technology, the heart of this entire thing, is that the adoption of open source software, the role of open source software, let's dwell into the role of open source software. Open source software has been game changer in the tech industry, allowing developers around the world to share, modify, distribute software.

So source core in the cloud, native world, open source projects of pivotal, Kubernetes, darker Prometheus is the many more. These are all our open source tool that are shaping the future of how we build, deploy, operate softwares. Open source tools enable innovation, accelerate application development, community collaboration, transparency.

They help to avoid vendor lock-ins, which is an important aspect for some of the organization and large enterprises. Let's talk now towards the downhill journey, the benefits and opportunities that comes with adopting the cloud and technologies. As we have seen, as we climb the number of challenges on the summit, the pivotal where we saw actually the benefits, the principles, and then as we go down the hill, now how do we realize what, what are the things that we realize as a value of adopting to the cloud native?

It increased stability, scalability, and resilience. Enhanced speed and agility. Agility, optimized resource usages.

Now, when we talk about scalable and resilient system with the adoption of cloud native, we have increased scalability. I remember, and it happened to me once, like you know, when we wanted to add actually one of the server to a cluster virtual emission cluster, and I have to wait for two mo two weeks to provision the particular hardware or provision the particular virtual mission because the hardware has to be ordered, they have to add the compute and storage and make network changes, and all this ha needs to happen and this needs to happen through clicking through the UI and you know, with the minimal automation and all this stuff. Now scaling is a blink of an eye with a microservice architecture and container orchestration.

These practices enable your systems to grow or shrink on demand. As the user demand increases, new instances can be spun up in moments allowing for a SP and responsive user experience even under heavy loads. The scalability is not just about the size, it also extends graphically enabling global distribution to bring you a services closer to the end users.

The hybrid cloud, the edge computing number two is about resiliency. There is a benefit of resilience in cloud native environment. Failure is expected and hence designed for it.

There was one of the popular blog posts by Adrian Koft, you know, during the Netflix days where designed for failures after the, the, the 2011 cloud provider outage and the, the system was designed to embrace failures. It means it can gracefully shut down, you can bring up your system, and systems are made to withstand the force and continue to operating smoothly. Number of organization, even today, they are struggling with this because of not having the right tools and techniques and practices when there's an outage to your banking system, e-commerce system or retail shopping systems like, you know, they take hours to come up and study the customer, but with the right mindset, with the right tool set, with the right techniques and practices, you can make this possible continue to operate smoothly without disruption or with a minimal disruption to your customers.

Microservices are, can be independently deployed and can run if one fails, the other continues to operate the benefit of distributed system architecture. Example I often quote is that if you want to withdraw the money from an A t m, even if it cannot print your receipt, you can still withdraw the money. So they give you that kind of a flexibility where if there is a one service not available, you can still give them the partial way of service.

It's available. Your customer even may not notice. You know, that's how the, the entire application is composed of smaller service and they coordinated will and choreographed will and the smooth experiences given to the customer.

The second part is that you have enhanced speed and agility and people who have worked on large systems and databases and big networks and storage systems, they have understood like, you know, more where actually was limiting us or a rigid infrastructure was limiting us in terms of accelerating our speed of delivery. Enter deploying and operating software cloud technologies also enhanced speed agility by leveraging containerization, microservices, DevOps practices like C I C D, our organization can achieve rapid frequent release of high quality software. It releases time from ideation deployment and helps business to respond to market changes quickly.

If there's a, like what happened during the pandemic time, like a lot of organization who had a digital presence, they survived, who had a minimal digital presence, they had to invest heavily to make it possible. Restaurants were delivering, taking orders and delivering food via digital channels. You could able to order for your groceries using digital channels.

You could able to order your, you are, uh, retail shopping everything through, uh, digital channels and it helps you the time from ideation to deployment. It's like you know from the, the idea that you have and if you want to test and validate the idea quickly and these kind of cloud native platforms, DevOps practices gives you that flexibility to validate your idea at speed and gives organization the agility. When things are changing, you can pivot so quickly and you can change, you can start adopting to the modern way of doing things or change to your system.

That's possible when there is a compliance requirement, when there is a security patching that you need for your applications or for library, you know, instead of waiting for months to deploy the changes to production, you can do with the help of the modern cloud native technologies and with the proper CS c d controls, you can achieve a rapid frequent releases. What are the final benefits of your downhill process? Here is optimize the resource utilization with ization applications.

Share the systems always is kernel, which means that they are highly beneficial for organization. They are lighter than virtual missions. They boot up faster, they use less compute and memory resources and optimize resource use, reduce operational cost and is more environmental friendly.

The SU sustainability that comes with your cloud technology and platforms. You no longer burning the entire power for running, powering up your fleet of missions. You are using only what is required on demand.

So there are some of the main benefits that make the downhill journey worth it after the uphill climb. In our next section, let's talk about how navigate this terrain and examine the tools and best practices and help you make your cloud native journey as successful. When we talk about navigation and it's a mix of tools and best practices, when I talk about tools, I'm talking about technology tools and the best practices including your engineering practices, your DevOps capabilities that you need to build on your C I C D pipelines, your security practices and so on.

People who are not familiar with the cloud native trial map or cloud native landscape, probably it's a worth a look on the right side. Of course, hold your breath and look at that. You have so many number of tools and technologies available on your cloud native landscape as of today.

The simplest way that you look at is actually on the, in your, your left side of your screen where you see the containerization, the cic, the orchestration, the service, me and networking. All these are made possible by any number of open source projects in the cloud native ecosystem. So there are a number of tools that you can pick and choose for composing your enterprises the benefit observability, observability, elasticity, resiliency, agility, and these are the things and please head to the CCF dot IU where you can see the number, the landscape and you can download, you can print it and also you can, there are a number of free closes available on this and you can do it as we move forward.

Whatever we do in this cloud native space and DevOps and cultural mind shift, these all are interconnected. Connecting the dots in our organization. What we mean by that, the cultural shift, the DevOps capabilities, the architectural shift, the open source adoption, security tooling, techniques, practices, continuous learning, all these are interconnected and delivering the value to your customer.

This all needs to happen together. Just deploying Kubernetes in your organization is not going to help you. Just having a ci CD pipeline is not going to help you.

Just having a high level security in our tooling when our tool is not going to help you. So it has to all work together, choreograph together to achieve and realize the value of the cloud native adoption. My dear friends, as we come up to the end of this presentation, we discussed about the uphill coin, the challenges in cloud native adoption at the summit, the principles of cloud native technologies at the downhill, the benefits and opportunities and then we have seen some tools and how connecting docs, the architecture, security tooling techniques, practice of collaboration and country as learning as navigational techniques to navigate through the terrain of this.

With a note, my topic was uphill downhill with cloud native technologies navigating the terrain of the transformation. My name is BM k LaMi I and Transformation architect with section six. I would like to thank Tech Song group, all the sponsors, all fellow speakers, and then the delegates for watching this presentation.

Thank you very much for the opportunity. Have a great day ahead and have a great conference. Thank you.