How To Select the Right Partner for Your Cloud-Native App Development?
0In the early 2000s, the cloud was a relatively new technological innovation, and few enterprise leaders backed it for adoption. Their primary concern was whether moving to the cloud would result in losing ownership of the critical software infrastructure that powered most of their core business operations. However, these fears have been allayed over time, and Gartner estimates that by 2025, nearly 95% of all new digital workloads will run on the cloud.
On one side, enterprises have the option to leverage third-party SaaS software to manage different areas of their business. While on the other, they can engage in building their own cloud-native apps that cater to different use-cases.
Leveraging an established third-party SaaS software is not a risky option as it will be backed by immense knowledge, dedicated R&D, implementation expertise, and transparent pricing contracts. However, most enterprises prefer to build their own cloud-native applications for major operations, primarily customer-facing digital channels.
A study commissioned by IBM found that nearly 78% of organizations want at least one app to be cloud-native from their planned cloud journey for digital applications. While cloud-native app development preferences are rising, there is a challenge for enterprise leaders to decide on how to build their cloud apps.
Deciding Between the Options Available
The two options available are to build it in-house or select a technology partner who can build it as per requirements. Unless your core business is software development, it is not advisable to build cloud apps internally.
The lack of key technical skills, inexperience in design, development, deployment, and management of cloud apps, lack of awareness of security practices, etc., can be considered major reasons to avoid in-house initiatives.
Therefore, the ideal option is to entrust a trusted partner to build the app matching all requirements. But then comes the dilemma of picking a partner from the vast number of options available in the market. On this note, let us explore ways to select the right partner for cloud-native app development initiatives:
Evaluate Vendor Agnostic Services
Like how traditional app development projects leveraged multiple technology stacks, modern cloud-native app development follows pretty much the same route today. A typical cloud app development project may leverage different third-party vendor services for various modular functionality.
However, it is important for enterprises to ensure that their technology partner offers a wide range of choices for vendor services. In simple terms, they need to be vendor agnostic and do not restrict an enterprise from having to adopt only a particular cloud provider’s technology landscape for their app development initiatives.
Evaluate Architectural Design Abilities
Modern cloud-native apps work well with flexible and modular architectures like microservices. While selecting a partner, check for their architecture design and development expertise from a cloud app perspective.
See whether they have the necessary skills on board like using REST APIs for data and information exchange, containerization approaches using Kubernetes, etc. These design and development principles for cloud-native apps will help enterprises leverage maximum benefits through reliable app performance.
Evaluate QA and DevOps Credentials
Quality Assurance (QA) is integral to every modern software development project. However, there is a paradigm shift in the way enterprise leaders see QA in the entire ecosystem of developing apps. Today, most software projects are run as productized entities in nearly every organization.
By transitioning to a product-oriented approach, DevOps, continuous deployment, and agile methodologies play a crucial role. As such, the right technology partner must be able to seamlessly integrate QA with DevOps and other relevant functions to ensure a risk-free launch for each product version.
Evaluate Automation Abilities
A successful cloud-native app development effort will be complemented by end-to-end automation of various activities like provisioning of cloud resources, proactive security audits, performance, scalability, and many other factors. Hence, selecting a technology partner with experience in full-scale automation of core cloud-app operations is essential.
Evaluate Security Aspects
Despite decades of evolution, there are emerging security threats that have the potential to impact enterprise apps deployed on the cloud. In fact, recent studies show that nearly 27% of all organizations experienced some form of a security incident in their public cloud infrastructure over a 12-month period. Thus, choosing a technology partner with proven security credentials is extremely important. This will help add an extra security layer over traditional security best practices.
Power Your Cloud-Native App Development with Clear Thought Solutions
Building cloud-native apps is an ideal way for enterprises to have more reliable and manageable digital operations. However, as elucidative above, selecting the right partner is a factor that plays a massive role in this regard. It can be the difference between the success and failure of such initiatives. And at Clear Thought Solutions, we understand that to the T.
Get in touch with us to explore how your enterprise can leverage our partnership to build the best cloud-native apps for your business.
