At the QCon London last year, I provided a Cloud-Native session about Culture, not Containers. What had started me thinking about the role of culture in cloud native was a great InfoQ article from Bilgin Ibryam. One of the things Bilgin did was define a cloud native architecture as lots of microservices, connected by smart pipes. I looked at that and thought it looked totally unlike applications I wrote, even though I thought I was writing cloud native applications. I’m part of the IBM Garage, helping clients get cloud native, and yet I rarely used microservices in my apps. The apps I create mostly looked nothing like Bilgin’s diagram. Does that mean I’m doing it wrong, or is maybe the definition of cloud native a bit complicated?

I don’t want to single Bilgin out, since Bilgin’s article was called “Microservices in the post-Kubernetes Era,” so it would be a bit ridiculous if he weren’t talking about microservices a lot in that article. It’s also the case that almost all definitions of cloud native equate it to microservices. Everywhere I looked, I kept seeing the assumption that microservices equals native and Cloud-native equals microservices. Even the Cloud Native Computing Foundation used to define cloud native as all about microservices, and all about containers, with a bit of dynamic orchestration in there. Saying cloud native doesn’t always involve microservices, which puts me in this peculiar position because not only am I saying Bilgin is wrong, I’m saying the Cloud Native Computing Foundation is wrong - what did they ever know about Cloud-native? I’m sure I know way more than them, right?

#containers #cloud #devops #development #culture & methods #cloud-native