FINAL WORD

To stay ahead of competition , organisations are constantly looking for ways to drive innovation with speed and agility , while maximising operational and economic efficiency at the same time . To that end , they have been migrating their applications to multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments for quite some time . Amr Alashaal , Regional Vice President – Middle East at A10 Networks , tells us here that organisations have started to rearchitect their existing applications or develop new ones as cloud-native applications .

Initially , these applications were moved to the cloud using a “ lift-and-shift ” approach , retaining their original monolithic architecture . However , such monolithic applications are unable to fully exploit the benefits offered by cloud , such as elasticity and distributed computing , and are also difficult to maintain and scale .

Consequently , as the next evolutionary step , organisations have started to rearchitect their existing applications or develop new ones as cloud- native applications .

A related aspect to deploying cloud-native applications is that of using automation to do so . Organisations deploying such applications have had success in automating the deployment of the underlying infrastructure on which these cloud-native applications run , as well with the initial deployment of these applications . They have , however , struggled with the subsequent steps , such as making these applications accessible to end-users , scaling the applications up and down , or moving them from one cloud to another .

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