Managing cloudnative development in your on-premises datacenter

Cloud-native apps are quickly supplanting legacy software because of their manageability, scalability, and portability. Instead of setting up and managing a physical server (LMS) to run your application, you could design a cloud-native app using serverless architecture. You would never have to worry about securing, updating, backing up, or maintaining the app’s resources again. The app would request more resources and scale up automatically to meet increased workloads. If you ever needed to switch cloud platforms, the transition would be quick and hassle-free.

Containerization is the core enabling technology of cloud-native development. Similar to the way VMs abstract away your computer hardware, containers abstract away the operating system. This creates a standard environment that you can develop for and be confident that your code behaves the same regardless of where it’s run. If you migrate your application to a different server, VM, or cloud platform, you won’t experience last-minute issues because of unexpected environmental factors.

Because of containerization, cloud-native apps support multiple programming languages. This makes it easier to find developers that have the right expertise for your development projects. Containers also make it easier to implement a microservice architecture, which simplifies code resilience, scalability, maintenance, and reuse.

Despite all these benefits, a significant number of businesses are hesitant to take the plunge and move their applications to the cloud. There may be regulatory restrictions that prevent them from uploading sensitive data to data centres outside their organization or country. They might have niche requirements that would require granular control over their hardware infrastructure. Maybe they have recently invested in a new data centre and are don’t want to scrap that investment in favour of a cloud subscription just yet.

Whatever the reason, you don’t have to give up on the advantages of cloud-native development just because you’ve decided to stay away from the public cloud. You can implement a complete stack of cloud technologies, including containers, in your private data centre and gain all the benefits of cloud-native app development. In this way, you can prepare yourself for a quick shift to the cloud, should you ever decide to make the move later on.

There are several private cloud solutions on the market today, but IBM Cloud Private is an ideal option, especially if you use IBM technologies in your organization. With a range of containerized versions of IBM software, IBM Cloud Private simplifies the adoption of cloud-native development for your existing IBM investments.