Four Challenges Facing Cloud Architects

Cloud native architectures have revolutionized the way businesses

operate their applications and services in the cloud.

This shift provides immense benefits, such as

increased agility, scalability, and cost savings.

However, moving to a cloud native architecture

also poses unique challenges that must be

addressed. What are some of the critical challenges facing

cloud native architectures? Stay tuned as I present

the top four challenges facing all cloud native

software architects. Are you ready? Let's go.

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atchison cloud native architectures have

revolutionized the way businesses operate their applications and

services in the cloud. Yet they've brought unique challenges that

must be addressed. Here are four critical challenges facing

cloud native architectures. Challenge number

One balancing complexity in microservice

applications. Microservice based applications

provide great advantages to the development of cloud native

applications. They allow for effective

organizational scaling to increase the number of developers

working on large, complex applications without getting

in each other's way. They allow complexity in the

application to be localized and isolated so

that it can be better understood by those owning a particular

service. But there is a balance

the smaller you make your services, the more services

you need. The more services you need, the more complex the

interaction is between and among those services.

So in an attempt to reduce the complexity of individual

services by making them smaller, you're

actually increasing the complexity of the entire system

as a whole. Finding the right balance

in service size between too large of services

resulting in localized complexity within the services themselves,

and too small of services resulting in

increased interconnection complexity is a

balancing act. Finding the right size for

your services is a challenge facing every cloud native

architect. Challenge number Two

automating operations and management.

Automation is perhaps the most significant advantage the cloud

provides to applications and application development.

Cloud architects need to make extensive use of

automation to manage their cloud environments

effectively. Automation assists cloud

architects. It assists them in scaling, in

resource provisioning, in creating and managing

infrastructure, and in deploying new and updated

features and capabilities. How you

effectively create automation systems and processes

without increasing the overall system complexity is

a challenge all cloud architects face. Building

too complex of an automation system results in fragile

systems and procedures. Yet not leveraging enough

automation means leaving cloud advantages behind.

Balancing between these two extremes is an important challenge for all

cloud architects. Challenge

number Three clarifying Ownership and Responsibilities

simply taking your single large monolith and splitting it into

tens or hundreds of services doesn't instantly

automatically make your application more supportable.

You must also structure your organization in the same way you

structure your application. Individual services

must have clear owning teams, and those teams must have

full and complete responsibility for all aspects of

managing that particular service, from developing

it to testing it, to deploying it,

to operating and supporting it. All aspects of the

lifecycle of the service are the responsibility of the owning team.

This avoids throw it over the wall and other passing the

buck behaviors that can devastate an organization

and negatively impact your incident response time

and management. Stosa

single team oriented service architecture is an architectural model

for how to structure your development organization in order

to effectively operate and manage your cloud native

microservice based application at scale.

Stosa talks about the power of service ownership and the power of

ownership responsibility. Ownership is a

critical part of any organizational success, it's an

essential part of any organizational strategy, and it's

absolutely essential for operating a modern application at

scale. Challenge Number

Four maintaining a Secure Cloud Environment

The cloud provides great advantages to application

development and operation. But lurking the back of many

people's minds is a basic question is the public cloud secure

enough for my application? Building

a safe and secure application environment is a

critical requirement for all applications.

The cloud can provide a great set of features and capabilities to

help you build a safe and secure environment. Keeping your

application secure in the cloud is practical and

it is achievable. In fact, it's

easier to keep your application safe in the cloud than

it is in your own data center. This seemingly obscure

thought is in fact, quite true the cloud is

more natively secure than your own data

center. Understanding concepts such as the

principle of shared responsibility are critical aspects

of developing a secure cloud environment.

But microservices can also create additional and unwanted

vulnerability points that bad actors can leverage to

compromise your application. In most

applications, all it takes is a single service to become

compromised, which can lead to a complete compromise

of your entire application stack.

Understanding how to keep microservice based applications

secure, both inside and out, is fundamental

to maintaining a safe and secure cloud native application.

Cloud native architectures have transformed how businesses operate

their applications and services in the cloud, offering

numerous benefits benefits such as increased

agility, scalability, and cost

savings. However, cloud native software

architects face unique challenges in developing and

operating these applications. They require a

strong focus on balancing complexity, organizing

for success, and maintaining a secure environment.

If you're interested in learning more, please take a look at the show

notes. Also, please go to

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Notes thank you for listening and welcome to the world of the

modern digital business.