Cloud native gets pitched as the next step, as though every company needs to do it to be considered modern. But this kind of thinking causes more damage than it fixes.
Cloud native speeds things up — that much is true — but it also multiplies your cybersecurity exposure. Does your situation benefit from that trade?
When should you adopt cloud native?
You have to constantly ship fast: If your product changes every week, breaking systems into smaller services will allow your teams to deploy without waiting on each other.
Your system has clear boundaries: Does each part of your system run independently without constant cross-dependencies? Cloud native works in this setup because each part can be changed without dragging the rest of the system with it.
Your team can handle distributed systems: Cloud native only pays off if your team already knows how to run distributed systems in production. When something breaks, they can trace it across services and pinpoint where it failed, and then fix it without taking the rest of the system down. If that’s not the case, you’re just adding more moving parts and making incidents harder to control.
When should you not adopt cloud native?
Your system is still simple: If one application handles your workload just fine, there’s nothing to gain from splitting it into services and adding overhead.
Your team is small or generalist: Microservices need clear ownership, in that each service has to be maintained and monitored by someone who knows it well. If your team shares everything, issues will just get passed around.
You don’t have strong observability: In a single system, you can usually see where something failed. But in a distributed setup, a request might pass through multiple services before it breaks. You can’t follow what happened if you don’t have proper tracing and linked logs.
Your workflows aren’t automated: Every service has to be built and deployed. If you’re still doing that manually, cloud native will have you doing the same work over and over across multiple services.
Need help deciding?
Talk to Cybersecurity Analytics. We assess how your systems are built and tell you where a distributed setup will help—and where it won’t—then make sure it’s secure as you scale. Call +48 886 282 803.
