The market for cloud-native solutions is growing steadily, but they come with a price. Analysts are predicting that more than 95 percent of application workloads will run on cloud-native platforms by 2025, however new technologies are not accepted linearly.
Cloud native development is the process of building and running applications in a cloud environment. By leveraging cloud architecture patterns, capabilities, and benefits, it optimizes performance, scalability, and cost efficiency. Basically, everything is delivered so that cloud-like functionality is readily available, whether it runs in the cloud or not. A cloud-native approach is popular because of its obvious benefits such as enhanced scalability, reliability agility and flexibility. Also the time-to-market is faster.
Disadvantages of Cloud-Native Computing
The development of cloud-native applications offers many advantages, but also has its downsides – which are often overlooked. As workloads are deployed under a cloud-native approach, the drawbacks become more evident. Please note that the potential drawbacks are not only the points when deciding whether to adopt a cloud-native approach.
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Vendor lock-in is a major challenge to consider with cloud-native development and deployment. Applications designed for a certain cloud provider rely heavily on that specific provider’s native capabilities, making it complex and expensive to shift or migrate to an alternative platform or provider. This can hinder a company’s ability to freely operate its applications in multiple locations, undermining the portability of cloud-native development. Despite this reality, the majority of cloud-native proponents believe the problem does not exist.
In addition, cloud-native development involves complex processes and may require different skills and tools than traditional development. Companies that have no or insufficient experience with cloud-native processes, challenges arise at this point, which require, for instance, additional training measures or additional resources. Overly complex and poorly designed applications may result from experimentations.
The last point is already discussed in our older articles, the pay-as-you-go pricing can result in unexpected extra costs if an application has an increase of usage.
Final Words
Companies should be able to fully exploit the potential of the cloud and drive innovation and growth by becoming cloud-native only by having a 360 degree practical experience.
