Contributed by Al Gillen, Group Vice President of Software Development and Open Source at IDC

Application developers are increasingly challenged with business requests that require new or enhanced custom applications. An International Data Corporation (IDC) survey data shows that 75% of developers at large organizations collaborate on 26–500 applications over the course of a year. As app development, deployment, and business priorities continue, developers are progressively utilizing cloud native application development methods to enable faster time to market through DevOps, more portable and easily updated architecture, less technology lock-in, and tapping into managed and automated services.

To support the deployment of a wide variety of applications, including custom applications created by enterprise developers, public clouds have evolved into a robust and low-friction platform on which to create and deploy new applications, incorporating the most comprehensive suite of services available. They’re meeting core enterprise demands for scalability, reliability, and security. Public clouds are also enabling enterprises to innovate with modern services, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, container orchestration services, and serverless computing.

The shift to cloud native services

IDC’s developer research finds that between 28% and 41% of U.S. developers report regular use of modern services, such as container orchestration frameworks, containers, microservices, and serverless computing, as part of their application development and deployment practices. Further, between 33% and 41% of U.S. developers are currently piloting the use of these services. As these pilots transition into formal deployments, the industry is poised for most developers to utilize these technologies for production use.

Developers appear confident about using these modern cloud native services, and between 69% and 75% of developers in the U.S. consider themselves to be either advanced or expert in their use. This same group of U.S. developers tell IDC that they use modern services as integral components in creating solutions in 11–30% of the new applications that they’re building today. Cloud platforms offer a convenient, economic, and safe way to access these capabilities, and as a result, go together with the accessibility of cloud native services.

What customers need in their environments

Gone are the days when an IT organization could offer an on-premises environment that could easily provide an analog to the services available in public clouds. Customers tell IDC that they have various needs for developing custom applications, both for brand-new, custom cloud native applications, and for modernizing older custom applications that remain business-critical.

This mix of requirements translates to a need for a public cloud architected to effectively run Kubernetes orchestration systems for containerized applications, microservices, and serverless functions. Further enabling technologies include blockchain, Kafka-based data streaming, analytics, text-to-speech, and speech-to-text translation, chatbots, image processing, machine learning, and various forms of artificial intelligence. Such a cloud also needs a stable set of API-fronted services ranging from data to edge services and the best in development tools, including robust DevOps pipeline capabilities and application performance monitoring.

The argument for cloud native development of modern custom applications using a public cloud platform includes the following value propositions:

  • Agility: Combining modern services with a more modular application design means that organizations can move from a one-release-per-year schedule to making releases weekly or monthly. We’ve seen the industry move steadily in this direction with leading organizations using DevOps for around a quarter of their overall application estate and virtually all their cloud native application portfolio. As more modern applications are built in increasingly modular ways (ideally using a microservices architectural design), they take advantage of the agility enabled by componentized service to reduce time to value for application enhancements.

  • Breadth of services: Developers likely need a broad range of services, although they might not need enough of any one service to justify buying software, deploying, and managing that service internally. Application deployment in public clouds means that all the services on that cloud are available and easily accessible, even services used infrequently. Good, better, best offerings are often available on public clouds that deliver varying degrees of scale or performance, allowing the balancing of functionality and subscription cost. The availability of these application services is an important factor to consider.

  • Speed to market: Deploying an application quickly depends upon a developer’s ability to easily deploy a new application and connect to any private or public services that they might need. Other resources might include optimized support for common languages, such as Java or Python, and widely used application frameworks. Cloud platforms typically offer one-stop shopping that makes it possible to connect to necessary cloud services swiftly and painlessly, instead of negotiating with multiple vendors for pricing of software services. Two-thirds of U.S. DevOps professionals cite factors like enhancing the customer experience and faster and higher-quality deployments as the primary justification for scaling DevOps today, which is well suited for the cloud.

  • Scalability: Cloud platforms offer scalability that’s effectively unlimited for most solutions. When container packaging and orchestration services are used with cloud platforms, it becomes practical to scale up or down, and redeploy application solutions to multiple clouds or to edge locations where applications might be optimally placed, so an organization can manage cloud-hosted and edge-hosted applications from a common console.

  • Security: While application security remains the responsibility of developers, cloud service providers strive to offer the most secure platform they can, along with incorporating automation to allow services to self-manage and self-secure with customer usage. These services free companies to focus more on innovation and shift some of their risk management to the cloud vendors.

Conclusion

The industry continues to expand its embrace of cloud native applications and modernization of existing applications on public cloud infrastructure, empowering enterprise users to create innovative applications. Across all types of online and global businesses, managers and developers can benefit from increased agility and faster response to changing market opportunities, on-demand scale, and a long list of available cloud services. As a result, organizations achieve benefits that can’t be realized in an on-premises environment, and those benefits produce value that leads to a positive impact on their businesses’ bottom line.

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