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Cloud Native

  • Glossary

"Cloud Native"

This glossary explains various keywords that will help you understand the mindset necessary for data utilization and successful DX.
This time, let's consider the concept of "cloud native," which is an essential perspective when considering how to use IT in business in the future, as the use of cloud services is becoming a given.

What is Cloud Native?

Cloud native refers to IT systems and a style of IT utilization that are created with a mindset that takes into account the new situation in which cloud services are widely provided and used, replacing traditional IT usage styles.
In a narrow sense, IT systems with a microservice architecture developed using container technology are sometimes called cloud-native, but in this article we will use the broader definition.

Reference: Articles related to "cloud native" in the narrow sense
⇒ Container Orchestration | Glossary

Technological changes in the cloud era

The emergence and spread of cloud services continues to create new, unconventional situations in various areas of IT and business. In light of these disruptive changes, I believe the essence of the term "cloud native" is to ask whether we are able to adapt to the new situations that follow.

In other words, I think cloud native is also a term that asks, "Are you properly adapting to changes in the times?" and "Are the new situations of the new era being taken into consideration as a premise (native)?"

So, what exactly are the "disruptive changes that have occurred in the cloud era" that are being questioned here? What are we being asked to do as a result of these changes? As an easy-to-understand example, let's look at the emergence of technical challenges that arose in the early days of the cloud.

Multi-tenancy

Before the advent of the cloud, using a computer meant preparing and using your own hardware. For business systems, you had to buy the hardware yourself and then either buy or have the software developed to run on it. If you wanted to play games, it used to be common sense to buy a game console, set it up in your room, and then load the game software you had bought and play.

At that time, the implicit assumption for software and IT systems was that they would be used in such situations.

  • Use of IT: Using hardware owned by Company A and running software owned by Company A.

Let's think about this from the perspective of a software developer/seller. At the time, the premise of the IT business was that if you wanted to do "IT for accounting work," you would develop accounting software and sell it as a package software, or you would be contracted to develop individual IT systems for specific customers and install the hardware.

Let's say your company is running a packaged accounting software business and is doing well, but then the cloud comes along and your competitors enter the cloud market, so you want to get in too.However, you may find that your company's software assets and software development track record are not "ready for the cloud era."

Because it's a cloud service, it needs to be provided as a service via the Internet (such as being accessible from a web browser). It's likely that the same UI as before won't be able to handle it. Even if that issue could be resolved, there are still many problems.

Cloud services are a business that provides software as a service to be used by many companies. For example, if you have 10 clients and you want to provide accounting software as a service to them, this is what would happen.

  • Dedicated hardware (execution environment) will be provided for each of the 10 companies.
  • Accounting software is run individually on these pieces of hardware and provided as a cloud service.

Although it is true that they can provide cloud services, even if it is a bit forceful, this not only increases costs, but also prevents the business from scaling, as the number of customers increases and the operational burden increases proportionally. It cannot be said that they have properly adapted to the cloud era (they are not cloud-native).

What's wrong with that? With packaged software, it was a given that both the hardware and software would be run exclusively, but in the cloud era, this "previously taken for granted" has become "outdated." So, the question (at the time) became whether cloud services were "multi-tenant."

  • One IT system runs on one piece of hardware (there is no need to run multiple identical systems).
  • The system is used as a service by many users (multi-tenant)

In the case of network games, instead of a quick fix where the game software that used to run on a game console is run individually for each user on the cloud, a huge piece of software runs on the cloud and is used by everyone.

This may seem like a no-brainer now, but in the 2000s, Salesforce actually promoted its "multi-tenant" nature as a difference from other cloud services.

So how can accounting software that was loved by customers in the packaged era survive in the cloud era?

  • It can be used immediately after launching, but there is no login function, so basic measures are needed to add missing features.
  • Make the desktop app a UI that can be used via a web browser
  • A function that distributes data to each company's environment after login so that each company can use it separately.
  • Even if each company uses the same system, each company's data is securely separated and cannot be seen by the other company.
  • Strong security considerations to prevent problems even if the service is made public on the Internet, rather than being closed on-premise (remaining vulnerabilities are unacceptable)

If you make it this far, it seems like it will work for now. However, when you try to provide it, you will find that the functionality is still lacking.

  • Without a system that grasps the usage status of each of the 10 companies individually and automatically calculates and bills usage fees, administrative processing would collapse.
  • In order to respond to customer audits, we needed a function to output usage logs individually.

As we move into a new era, it's difficult to know what to do. You may even need to learn by trying things, failing, and struggling. Alternatively, cloud native is not something where the correct answer is determined in advance, but something that can be achieved through trial and error.

After overcoming these difficulties, our accounting software became cloud-native (at least in the early days of the cloud). However, if it was so difficult (it would cost money and cause inconvenience to customers), it might have been better to continue doing business as packaged software.

The emergence of AWS

I've introduced examples of early efforts as "easy-to-understand examples," but the real big changes came much later. For example, the emergence and spread of AWS led to the spread of "AWS-style system development," which was also a big change.

Initially, "developing a system using the cloud (AWS)" meant simply renting a virtual machine (Amazon EC2) provided by AWS via the Internet instead of physical hardware to run an IT system, and "everything else was the same as before." However, a change is occurring that will make this "outdated."

By making full use of the various services provided by AWS, IT systems are being created with a "fundamentally different concept" from traditional system development. As other cloud companies such as Google and Microsoft have followed suit in terms of functionality, so-called "AWS-native" development methods have become the norm for the new era, and now IT systems that are not built AWS-natively are even considered outdated.

  • Not cloud native:
    We do use virtual machines on the cloud (Amazon EC2), so we use the cloud or AWS, but other than that it is basically the same as before, and availability and reliability are ensured in the same way as before.
  • Cloud native (in the AWS sense):
    Persistent data is stored not on virtual machines but on managed services such as Amazon S3 and Amazon RDS, and processing is performed on EC2 instances that are automatically started by the ELB load balancer and increased or decreased depending on the load situation. This is a significantly different system architecture from conventional systems.

I won't go into detail, but AWS itself offers the "AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner" certification, which teaches you a "new way of thinking" about system development using AWS, and the certification proves that you understand this. If you're interested, it's a good idea to study for that.

The emergence and popularity of container technology

The changes don't end there, but continue. After that, container technology appeared and spread, and a new style of system development that fully utilized container technology, so-called "container-native," began to become popular as a system development method for a new era.

AWS itself has quickly adopted this new trend and evolved, but the pre-container style of developing Amazon EC2-based systems now feels somewhat outdated.

⇒ Container | Glossary
⇒ Container Orchestration | Glossary

In other words, rather than there being one major change in the cloud era, changes are occurring repeatedly, and we are sure that new technologies that will shake up the engineering world will continue to emerge in the future.

There is a lot of talk about "cloud native" being synonymous with microservices, but at the time of writing, the cutting edge of technological discussion is often "IT system development with microservice architecture using container technology." Microservices may become an "outdated way of thinking" in the future (however, it is still a technology that merits attention at present, and it is not something that should be ignored because it is not a long-term certainty).

Not only has development technology changed, but business has also changed

After reading this far, some of you may have thought that cloud native is a topic only for engineers in the development department, and is a "technical issue" that has no relevance to other departments.

There is a tendency in the world to shy away from or downplay technology, saying that it is irrelevant because we are talking about business, but the impact of "disruptive changes brought about by the advent of the cloud" is also reaching the business side. Whether or not something is "cloud native" is being questioned on the business side as well. Below are some easy-to-understand examples.

Fundamental changes in business assumptions (initial costs and speed of deployment)

Before the advent of services like AWS, if you wanted to offer a network game in-house, you had to make all the arrangements yourself, from procuring expensive professional hardware to securing a data center for installation. It was common for a budget of hundreds of millions of yen and a period measured in years just to launch a service. This meant that decisions could not be made lightly, and the process of creating a detailed business plan, getting it approved, and securing funding tended to be complicated. Even though it was IT, it required approaches that were more heavily influenced by traditional business practices.

However, the situation changes dramatically when system development becomes possible using AWS. If you start small, a budget of several million yen is sufficient, and a similar service can be launched in just a few months. In this situation, the traditional, heavy-handed decision-making style becomes unnecessarily time-consuming, and the time and cost spent on things other than the core system development becomes a problem.

For example, while your company wastes a year simply going through the same old procedures in a conference room, your competitors are actually developing services, bringing them to market multiple times, and moving forward. This will result in you losing, and your engineers will leave. In this situation, the opportunity loss caused by the heavy decision-making becomes a bigger problem for your business. This is how the new normal of the cloud era will emerge.

Serverless and "zero fixed costs" world

Furthermore, it is now possible to realize a business structure with "zero fixed costs." Have you ever heard of the latest cloud technology, "serverless"? It is attracting attention as a convenient and hassle-free technology for engineers, but it also has revolutionary properties for businesses.

With "serverless," you only pay for what you use, and there are no costs when you don't use it. In other words, there are essentially no fixed costs. What's more, (if designed carefully), you can even auto-scale your service even if it suddenly becomes a huge hit and tens of thousands of users flock to it.

Traditionally, it was common knowledge that if you started a business on a small scale and it was a hit, you were likely to miss out on the opportunity, and if you prepared for a big business and it didn't hit, you would end up with a huge loss. The latest technology has created a world where neither of these risks exist. Naturally, there are labor costs involved in developing the system, but after that, if there are few users, there are almost no variable costs and almost no fixed costs.

In other words, even if there are 100 services that have flopped and are left unused, there will be almost no maintenance costs for the services, so it will not be a major financial problem. Furthermore, if a service is featured on television and suddenly users flock to it, in the past the service would have gone down and people would have felt extremely frustrated, but with automatic scaling out there is no lost opportunity.

While this technology is a boon for engineers, these characteristics are considered to be a revolutionary change "for the business side." IT is now an essential element of business, and if that is the case, then surely we should take into consideration the existence of technology that revolutionizes the very foundations of business.

In this way, there are also business aspects that need to change to cloud native.

And many other changes

With this in mind, I think the meaning of phrases like "starting small," which is often used in a spiritual sense, will begin to look different. Starting small is no longer just a matter of "feelings," but rather a question of whether you understand the "disruptive changes in technological assumptions that have occurred in the cloud era" and are able to change common sense on the business side based on that understanding.

Relationships with customers will also change dramatically. With the spread of cloud computing and widespread use of smartphones, IT can now be used to maintain real-time contact with customers 24 hours a day. Human sales and support teams cannot be with customers 24 hours a day, but with today's IT, this can be done. This, too, should be considered a disruptive change.

As you can see, there are many areas other than the technology itself that are experiencing disruptive changes between pre-cloud and post-cloud. As such, the question of whether something is cloud-native or not is being asked about everything.

The trend of the times is "in-house production"

On the other hand, topics like system development using microservice architectures that make full use of container technology are likely to seem far removed from most companies. This is because the technology that is necessary in situations where skilled engineers can be recruited in abundance and large-scale cloud services are provided to the world is not a realistic assumption for all organizations.

In that case, the discussion of cloud native and new ways of interacting with IT that take into account the disruptive changes in business that I wrote about in the second half of this article will likely become even more important.With that in mind, I think that the initiative of "in-house development" is currently a hot topic.

Business and IT are now inseparable, and in an age where speed of change is essential, it is highly desirable for business sites to be able to use IT to their advantage and move business forward quickly.

The cloud era from the perspective of in-house development

The spread of cloud services has also brought about major changes in the efforts of business sites to master IT on their own.

Unlike in the past, when simply introducing IT required a large budget and a long period of time, there are now a wide variety of SaaS services available on the cloud. You can pay for the SaaS you want to use with your credit card and start using the service five minutes later.

Even if you can't program, you should be able to use kintone, for example. In this way, if you have the determination to "do it yourself," there are many things you can actually do.

As cloud computing becomes more widespread within companies, even if they start to need more than what SaaS itself can provide, there are ways for them to do it themselves. For example, even if they feel they need programming, there are now many no-code and low-code tools available.

In-house production efforts are progressing further with "connecting" technology

There are several cases where SaaS alone cannot do what you want. For example, there are cases where you feel that you need more functionality (such as a lack of functionality for data processing), and cases where you want to "link" it with other services or external data and use it in combination.

As cloud utilization advances, the adoption of SaaS, which is useful for various business processes, increases, and the need to integrate cloud services increases. For example, it is common to want to link customer data stored in Salesforce with customer data stored in kintone, or to somehow combine Excel, which has long been used in the field, with a cloud service.

Furthermore, many initiatives that would have a significant impact if they were realized, such as linking with IT systems in other departments or with IT systems used by business partners and partner companies, can be realized if they can be "linked" with external systems and data. The need to "link" is sometimes considered a minor aspect of the need to utilize IT, but it is often the essence of value realization rather than the SaaS itself.

Are you manually doing the "integration"?

When collaboration is required, it is often the case that data is transferred manually. Or, there are many workplaces where manual processing is taken for granted and no one thinks there are any other options.

The hassle of all this can cause you to stagnate in your use of the cloud, or even to unwillingly reduce the number of cloud services you use (such as giving up on the kintone and Salesforce combination and sticking to just kintone).

However, there is already a good solution for this situation. It is a method that allows business sites to use IT to solve problems such as "resolving integration needs with the power of IT" and "supplementing missing functions in SaaS from outside and automating processes." These are "connecting" technologies such as "DataSpider" and "HULFT Square," also known as "EAI," "ETL," and "iPaaS."

Can be used with GUI only

Unlike regular programming, there is no need to write code. By placing icons on the GUI and configuring settings, you can achieve integration processing with a wide variety of systems, data, and cloud services.

Being able to develop using a GUI is also an advantage

​No-code development using only a GUI may seem like a simple compromise compared to full-scale programming. However, being able to develop using only a GUI allows "on-site business personnel to take the initiative in their work." On-site personnel are the ones who know the business best.

Full-scale processing can be implemented

There are many products that claim to allow development using only a GUI, but some people may have a negative impression of such products as being too simple.

It's true that tools that advertise themselves as easy to use often lead to problems like "it's easy to create things, but you can only do simple things," "when I tried to execute a full-scale process, it couldn't process and crashed," or "it didn't have the high reliability or stable operation capacity to support business operations, which caused a lot of trouble."

"DataSpider" and "HULFT Square" are easy to use, but they also allow you to create processes at the same level as full-scale programming, and have the same high processing power as full-scale programming, as they are internally converted to Java and executed, and have a proven track record of supporting corporate IT for many years. They combine the benefits of "GUI only" with full-scale capabilities.

No need to operate in-house as it is iPaaS

DataSpider can be operated securely on a system under your own management. With HULFT Square, a cloud service (iPaaS), this "connecting" technology itself can be used as a cloud service without the need for in-house operation, eliminating the hassle of in-house implementation and system operation.

Related keywords (for further understanding)

  • container
    • Containers are a technology that creates an execution environment for multiple independent application systems within a single OS execution environment. Containers perform OS-level virtualization, as opposed to the hardware-level virtualization that has been used up until now.
  • Microservices
    • Microservices is a new system development style that has become popular thanks to container technology. The concept is to proactively create system components as microservices, which are small, independent units, and to configure the entire system from a large number of microservices.
  • Container Orchestration
    • An automation technology that manages, operates, and controls a large number of containers in system development and operation using container technology.
  • EAI
    • It is a concept of "connecting" systems by data integration, and is a means of freely connecting various data and systems. It is a concept that has been used since long before the cloud era as a way to effectively utilize IT.
  • ETL
    • In the recent trend of actively working on data utilization, the majority of the work is not the data analysis itself, but rather the collection and preprocessing of data scattered in various places, from on-premise to cloud.
  • iPaaS
    • A cloud service that "connects" various clouds with external systems and data simply by operating on a GUI is called iPaaS.

Are you interested in "iPaaS" and "connecting" technologies?

Try out our products that enable you to successfully utilize IT by freely linking various data and systems, from on-premise IT systems to cloud services.

The ultimate "connecting" tool: data integration software "DataSpider" and data integration platform "HULFT Square"

Try outDataSpider/ HULFT Square 's "connecting" technology:


Why not try a PoC to see if "HULFT Square" can transform your business?

Why not try verifying how "connecting" can be utilized in your business, the feasibility of solving problems using data integration, and the benefits that can be obtained?

  • I want to automate data integration with SaaS, but I want to confirm the feasibility of doing so.
  • We want to move forward with data utilization, but we have issues with system integration
  • I want to consider data integration platform to achieve DX.

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