Trade-offs in a Cloud-Native Ecosystem
The Cloud has lived up to its hype. It is versatile, scalable and does not go heavy in your pocket, or your mind. However, people who have adopted Cloud just for the sake of it, publicity or to reduce operational cost may find themselves cutting corners in the long run, simply because they did not understand Cloud implications.
Before refactoring the code of Cloud native systems, it is always better to consider the downside of rampant decisions that we can miss easily in midst of the promise of providing enhanced performance, lower operational costs, easier operations, etc.
Core Technologies Services, Inc considers the following factors to be worth understanding before you take the plunge into the Cloud world. And those already into the migration process, these aspects may help to refactor your coding process before deployment.
Lockin: While localizing an application, the coding of the native APIs are made in Cloud. This makes a cloud-native give up some or all of its portability. Simply put, by using native APIs, without refactoring again, it will be difficult to move that code to other clouds, or back to on-premises systems. It is also a significant investment in time and added risk, depending on the complexity of the applications.
Native benefits: Though IT organizations use native APIs, they are not always beneficial. The benefit of using APIs during operations is significantly less after deployment. Therefore, the initial time and energy spent on native services often yield less.
Change in Native features: Refactoring an application is hard but it is harder to do it when services change. The service access of a static API is always dynamic and the cloud provider will need to change them to meet system needs. Therefore, you need to consider what changed in the application and refactor accordingly.
CoreIT believes the whether there are native benefits, lockin or service changes, Cloud has value. But in some cases, the cost of keeping up with the service changes is not worth using the cloud-native services in the first place. So choose wisely
