Is there any reason to not work in the cloud?

Cloud computing is incredibly and increasingly popular. Tech giants Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all offer cloud services to both millions of individual users and large companies like Netflix, Linkedin, and Twitch. The cloud market is worth an estimated $321 Billion and it shows no sign of slowing down. This begs the question, should your new project be cloud-native?

Someone else’s computer?

‘Cloud’ and ‘Cloud-Native’ are not the same thing. There’s an oft remarked joke that there’s no such thing as the cloud, ‘it’s just someone else’s computer’. It’s true that you can use the cloud like this but you won’t reap all the benefits. GitLab defines a ‘Cloud Native’ approach as one using containers (i.e Docker), orchestration (i.e Kubernetes), and Microservices. There’s some debate over this definition but the consistent throughline is that the architecture of the app needs to be influenced by the cloud; a ‘Cloud’ app simply runs on a machine in some datacentre, a ‘Cloud Native’ app makes use of the unique aspects of cloud computing.

#cloud-native #cloud-computing #aws #azure #cloud