AvidThink Principal Analyst Roy Chua will kick off the FierceTelecom Summer Blitz virtual event next week with a presentation on the topic of cloud native.

It’s an important topic because practically every telco in the world is in the process of introducing cloud-native technologies in its network.

Some greenfield operators such as Rakuten and Dish are building their networks with cloud-native technology from the onset.

Dish recently announced that it will use Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud to host its core and radio access network (RAN) for 5G. Chua said, “Dish is actually betting their whole farm on AWS.”

One thing that the panelists will discuss next week is the definition of cloud native. Chua said it is rather ambiguously defined. “At the highest level it’s building your applications to use the cloud delivery model and provide services in the cloud. Inside that, the technologies that are usually part of it are containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure, the use of automation and the use of continuous integration and continuous delivery.”

Cloud native offers the ability to develop apps faster and to scale them to much larger numbers than is possible with traditional applications. Cloud-native applications also lower operational costs and require less effort to manage.

However, cloud native has some of its own challenges.

It’s a collection of services that are spun up as needed, and they have to coordinate and talk amongst each other. Chua said trouble-shooting can be tricky because microservices are ephemeral. If there’s a problem, the microservices may go away before the problem is fixed.

And in a cloud-native architecture, everything is disaggregated. “Disaggregation is great, but you have to put things back together,” he said. “That’s where Kubernetes comes in. It gives you a relatively lean way of orchestrating and managing your cloud-native, containerized services.”

Verizon is doing cloud native

Miguel Carames, director of network and technology planning at Verizon, will be speaking on next week’s FierceTelecom panel. Of cloud native, he said, “It’s all about decoupling the app from the infrastructure and getting more common services provided by the infrastructure itself.”

He said cloud native is much more efficient because it eliminates a lot of duplication. Traditionally, each application had a lot of administrative functions, and those were replicated across all the applications. “Cloud native is: find these common functions and make sure this is provided by the platform,” said Carames. “The containers that are handling can access that information as needed, but they can go to these microservices where the state is stored as opposed to having to replicate. This is all built in our telco cloud.”

Verizon’s telco cloud is known as the Verizon Cloud Platform (VCP). It has different flavors with different capabilities depending on where it is deployed in the network, whether core, edge or RAN.

“When we started this virtualization journey, containers were not mature enough to trust for telco workloads,” said Carames. Instead, Verizon built its VCP using OpenStack software. But its new 5G standalone core is being built with cloud-native software. “Things that are already in OpenStack we will leverage them because we already made the investment, we’ll have that in the network,” he said. “But as we get to end-of-life considerations on hardware, we will be moving legacy to cloud native as well. Everything that is new will be deployed in cloud native.”

Of the challenges to moving to cloud native, Carames cited people and culture. “We need to train all the teams, even the planning role. You need operations and planning to be a lot more aware and understand how apps interact.”

He said the other challenge relates to working with Verizon’s vendors. “In many ways our vendors provide something, but we provide the platform, and we have to share our specs so they can come and integrate. The network vendors need to know the architecture.”

Speaking of vendors, Ericsson VP of Core, IT & Cloud Technology Ravi Vaidyanathan will also be participating on the Fierce panel next week. His group at Ericsson is helping operators on their cloud-native journey. “We have our cloud infrastructure offering — a telco-grade, container-as-a-service platform based on open source Kubernetes,” said Vaidyanathan. “We’re working on the bare metal versions of cloud native.”

He said when it comes to applications, Ericsson has used 5G as a key transition technology to build a 5G portfolio from the ground up as cloud native.

Similar to Carames, he said one of the big benefits of a cloud-native architecture is that common features don’t have to be replicated myriad times. “I can focus on my network functions,” said Vaidyanathan. “I don’t need to focus on something like logging.”

Another benefit of cloud native is streamlined operations and the rapid pace of introducing new features. “Amazon launches dozens of services every day,” said Vaidyanathan. “Telcos are aspirational at looking to match that pace.”

While Ericsson has been helping telcos on their cloud-native journey, the vendor decided to also adopt cloud-native processes for it own internal software development.

It is no contradiction to say that being ‘cloud-native’ has not much to do with cloud computing. There is an idea that cloud is a place, a suite of technologies or services that run somewhere in data centres. But the cloud is not a place; it is a way of working. A culture.

But what does culture really mean in the context of cloud? American sociologist Ron Westrum defined organisational culture as “the organisation’s pattern of response to the problems and opportunities it encounters.” This could be broken into three cultural archetypes. A pathological culture, which focuses on the personal interests and resources of the leader. Information is processed so that it only advances parts of the organisation. It is power, political, and blame orientated. A bureaucratic culture on the other hand centres on channels and procedures. Innocent at first glance, it becomes problematic when dealing with urgent problems or crises, or meeting needs beyond the limits of the rules process in place. Finally, there is the generative culture. According to Westrum, generative culture is the most effective in maintaining a highly functional organisation. When it comes to cloud-nativity, what we are really talking about is being generative.

Constructing culture
A generative culture is proactive and focused on getting information to the right people by any means necessary. The leader emphasises the accomplishment of goals and missions, rather than personal gain or rules. New ideas are welcome.

Failures and accidents are seen as opportunities to improve, not witch-hunts. Errors are subject to honest post-mortem and risks are shared. For example, Netflix calls unwanted incidents ‘surprises’, eliminating negative stigma and encouraging people to bring mistakes to light so they can be learned from. Strong cooperation is encouraged, with cross-functional collaboration towards common goals. There are no ‘heroes’ (more on that later), but rather a culture that embraces individual strengths to create cohesive teams. A prime example of this in action is the work of Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft. He radically transformed the organisation’s corporate culture by changing the way the company develops products, generates revenue, and manages people.

In fact, many cloud-native companies – those that build and run scalable applications in the cloud make it a point of honour to publicly define the principles of their culture. AWS has its fourteen ‘Leadership Principles’, which champion accountability, risk-taking, and development of talent. Google defines a ten-point business philosophy, encompassing team achievements, and pride in individual accomplishments that contribute to overall success. Microsoft talks about five cultural attributes, starting with its growth mindset: “always learning and insatiably curious”. And VMware has built its culture on execution, passion, integrity, customers, and community (EPIC2). All of these are examples of generative cultures in action.

Sending superheroes off into the sun
In The Phoenix Project, an allegorical novel set in a DevOps developer’s nightmare, we meet a superhero developer named Brent. Every organisation has a Brent. The person that knows how to do everything, with exceptional focus and problem solving skills, and helpful to everyone.

In a generative culture this kind of superhero is a problem. Very talented superheroes are often overwhelmed with requests and meetings, predisposing them to become a bottleneck. As they do not scale, they first burn bright and then burn out. They make themselves irreplaceable but do not scale and leave anyway. Typically they appear at the last minute, find a pragmatic solution to save the day and then leave almost immediately afterwards. This is symptomatic for a dysfunctional team culture.

Instead, cloud-native cultures rely on learning organizations and balanced teams; autonomous groups of people with a variety of skills and perspectives that support each other towards a shared goal. They have the resources and authority to complete projects, and are self-organising, learning from each other through cross-disciplinary collaboration and iterative delivery. Through pairing and knowledge transfer, each team member could save the world.

Of course, nurturing a cloud-native team doesn’t just happen. It requires a foundation stone.

Flourishing in psychological safety
According to internal research by Google, psychological safety is the most important characteristic of high performing teams. It allows team members to feel secure about taking risks. In such environments, people are better able to be themselves, to make suggestions, and to be vulnerable.

Crucially, psychological safety gives teams permission to fail. Obviously, the goal is not to try to make mistakes, but accept error as part of the realm of possibility and use it to learn and improve. In other words, it is about allowing experimentation and play.

Playing, learning and growing
An experiment is something we conduct to formulate and validate hypotheses. We plan just enough. We use lean product management and craft user tests. We escape analysis-paralysis and explore fields of possibilities. Play loosens boundaries even further, while sky-rocketting team motivation and commitment. It could take the form of chaos engineering featuring Netflix’ monkeys, a capture the flag security game, a wheel of misfortune disaster roleplay exercise, or some ChatOps bot.

Both experiments and play are a vital facet of Carol Dweck’s growth mindset, another catalyst for generative teams. A growth mindset embraces learning while strengthening beliefs that you can control and improve abilities. It envisions challenges and failure as opportunities to grow personally, and values constructive feedback. Especially in IT, where change is the only constant, perpetual learning is a growth mantra. Generative organisations facilitate the learning of its members, and as a result, continuously transform.

The advancement of technology
Cloud-native culture can be nurtured into almost any industry – but it is highly pertinent for the technology community. For technology to advance, we need cultures where risk-taking, growth and experimentation is part and parcel of organisational mindset. That’s at the heart of how innovation works. In fact, the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) research program found that a highly reliable organisational culture with an emphasis on information flow is predictive of software delivery performance and organisational performance.

Often corporate culture is stigmatised as the ultimate weapon for maximising corporate productivity. In reality though the scope and impact of a strong generative culture goes far beyond productivity.

It is about a culture where innovation can not be helped and is an intrinsic part of operations. It is about teams of talented individuals that identify with their company’s mission and have its success at their heart, while also giving those individuals the chance to grow and to recognise the value of their work. Retaining and attracting talent when you embody generative culture is no challenge.

With increasing move to cloud infrastructures, we have seen rapid growth of cloud-native applications. These applications are a collection of small, faster, and integrated services. By creating and operating cloud-native applications, businesses bring new ideas to market faster and respond instantly to customer demands. These applications typically empower enterprises to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic cloud environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds. Serverless architectures, containers, Kubernetes, and others are some cloud-native applications. Though these are designed to deliver enhanced business value, they also introduce a set of cybersecurity risks.

Businesses substantially move to cloud computing in order to boost the scalability and availability of applications. This can be achieved through self-service and on-demand provisioning of resources, in addition to the application life cycle automation from development to production. Cloud-native applications embrace the runtime and services provided by the cloud platform to create resilient, agile, and scalable solutions.

Securing Cloud-Native Applications
Securing cloud-native infrastructure requires a profound understanding to detect where the security needs. Considering security professionals’ responsibilities that rely on the services they are consuming is also imperative to implement security measures to apps. According to Gartner, 99% of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault through 2026. To close this security gap, CIOs will need to deploy and enforce policies on cloud ownership, responsibility and risk acceptance.

So, what is essential to securing cloud-native applications?

High Fidelity Visibility and Context
Visibility is the most crucial aspect of cloud applications’ cybersecurity. A lack of centralized administration and visibility can lead to the chances of undetected misconfigurations, as well as the inability to quantify risks. Security alerts that lack context and generally require human intervention can also result in delays in mitigation and alert fatigue.

Continuous Security
As enterprises leverage cloud-native technologies, such as Kubernetes, across their clouds, the complexity and distributed nature of these platforms significantly require businesses to plan strategies not only for DevOps, but also for security. Addressing vulnerabilities and threats in the cloud-native development model and infrastructure requires continuous security across the software development lifecycle. It also requires a shared security responsibility and ownership, along with shared processes and tools. This will enable organizations to keep cloud-native deployments in general, and infrastructure, applications and data specifically, safe and cybersecurity-proof.

Security of Server Workloads
Cloud workload security is particularly challenging and as workloads pass among multiple vendors and hosts so the responsibility for securing the workload must be shared. Many companies still use traditional enterprise security solutions to endpoints security, network segmentation, and perimeter protection. However, in a cloud-native environment, businesses cannot rely on these traditional security solutions. Server workloads these days are more vulnerable to cyberattacks than ever before. According to VMware, micro-segmentation and bare-metal hypervisor are two main ways to protect workloads with cloud workload protection platform.

As a very unique year slowly comes to an end, experts are here again to predict the most promising trends in the app development industry. In this article, we will discuss the cutting-edge software technologies, programming languages and other areas that I believe are going to gain more power in the software industry battle next year

1. Native App Development

It’s no surprise that this approach will gain momentum, especially in the banking/fintech industry, multimedia products and other areas with increased demand for flawless performance on mobile devices, reliability, quality and security. Native development provides enhanced user experience and outstanding performance when these parameters are a priority.

2. The Internet Of Things

The rise of IoT is not going to stop in 2021. Smart home systems, Bluetooth trackers, car gadgets, point-of-sales beacons, IoT devices for manufacturers and plants, smart wearables for healthcare and fitness. This is just a handful of possible use cases for internet-of-things technologies. IoT should be mixed with AI and big data for maximum productiveness, but it remains highly trendy. According to a 2018 Bain and Co. report, “We expect the markets for IoT hardware, software, systems integration, and data and telecom services to grow to $520 billion in 2021, more than double the $235 billion spent in 2017.”

There definitely will be more implementation opportunities that will help people improve their quality of life. More affordable and effective IoT devices will change most industries. As for IoT software development, I think IoT engineers from all over the world should improve their programming skills to write code for energy-efficient connected devices.

3. Human Augmentation

Human augmentation is a set of technologies that is used to enhance, replace or complement the natural abilities of people. Human 2.0 technologies exist in the form of implants built into the body, such as devices to restore sight or hearing, or external devices and tools, such as exoskeletons to improve natural capabilities. New technologies and use cases are on their way to significantly improving human lives, and the technology we’ve seen from things like Google Glass is just the beginning.

4. Big Data

Big data computation is still among the top trends and investment opportunities. In 2021, a significant part of the job is going to be carried out by the tools that process everything in memory right away instead of storing data after each calculation. Batch processing frameworks are going to be in demand, especially when it comes to social media data, documents and text analysis, and clickstream media. I believe big data will be used to facilitate climatic change research and search for new medical cures, and it will be used for a more natural language processing and easier data governance. However, cybersecurity in this area will remain a challenge.

5. Artificial Intelligence Expansion

Despite being a buzzword, used both correctly and incorrectly, AI is still a top technology and will become more powerful, affordable and widespread. Deep learning, machine learning, speech processing and more are going to be used more in ecommerce, healthcare, education and entertainment apps. AI is what helps businesses and organizations provide more personalized experiences for customers, and this trend will continue in a more cost-effective manner next year.

6. Continuous Integration And Deployment

This practice is aimed to cut down the cycle of feature delivery, make bug fixing more frequent and effective, and allow more flexibility and experiments in software development. Continuous delivery means apps get into production for thorough testing, while continuous deployment updates them automatically. As the code is added to a shared repository, it is tested so the delivery is accelerated. It enables software development teams to continuously improve functionality and deliver products faster. No wonder more software development companies will implement this approach in their work.

7. Progressive Web Apps

When comparing websites to web apps, the former ones are easier to access, while the latter can provide broader functionality and top performance due to embracing platform-specific hardware support. Still in their infancy, progressive web apps have become a valuable compromise between easy access and five-star performance. Users get a full-fledged and full-screen experience with less data usage and shorter loading time. They transfer the app-like features into the browser window, thus marking a revolution of web development. A lot of world-renowned platforms — including Forbes, AliExpress, Pinterest and Twitter — already make use of PWA adoption. To my mind, they are going to dominate the market of web products in 2021.

8. Low-Code Development

Previously, it took large, dedicated teams of software engineers and architects to create any type of digital solution. It used to be very expensive and barely available to medium-sized businesses. However, the low-code development trend is here to simplify complex programming languages and provide access to a coding miracle to more specialists. Low-code platforms have the necessary potential to revolutionize the software market, avoid a lot of manual work, and provide simple interfaces to help people build new apps at a low investment of money, time, and specific skills.

9. Cross-Platform And Hybrid Development

For some industries or application types, cross-platform development becomes a major time-saver and facilitator. So we cannot say that only the development will be mostly native in 2021. The common back-end code base for mobile platforms can be a compromise between functionality and time to market. Back-end code shareability with the native rendering engine (as in the case of cross-platform development) will achieve impressive results at a reasonable investment in the coming year.

Takeaway

I believe new programming languages will appear at the forefront of software engineering next year. You can also expect to see new technologies appear and some of the 2020 buzzwords vanish. Software development is a highly competitive industry that impacts every sector — it will only continue to grow and become more diversified.