You can (and should) go cloud-native on premises!

Cloud-native transformations do not mean throwing out the proverbial baby with the bath water and eliminating on-premises data centers. Putting all of your applications and data onto someone else's computers (because that's cloud infrastructure in a nutshell) is not the true path to being cloud-native.

The mission, operational, security, and capacity needs still support a demand for on-premises, self-managed environments with the capacity to transition applications and resource consumption across hybrid architectures.

In the past, these data centers were like traditional forts - large, centralized, and difficult to modify. If you wanted to make changes or upgrades, it often meant significant downtime and disruption. Cloud-native solutions are changing this by introducing a more modular, agile approach to building and managing the hardware and applications within data centers, with leading solutions increasing the ability to seamlessly move, consume, and realize benefits across cloud, on-premises, and edge environments. This shift will enable levels of operational agility for building, fielding, integrating, and orchestrating digital capabilities like never before.

To explain the impact of a cloud-native approach on operational agility in data centers, it is useful to draw parallels with concepts that are readily understandable and relatable.

Digital Operational Agility: Tying it to Military Operations

Operational agility in the military sense means the ability to move quickly and efficiently, to adapt to changing situations, and to maintain effectiveness across a range of conditions. In the context of data center operations, cloud-native approaches offer a similar kind of flexibility and responsiveness by applying proven resource orchestration and automation to self-managed infrastructure.

Key Benefits of Cloud-Native for Data Centers

1. Rapid Deployment and Scaling: Just as a quick-response military unit can deploy to any hotspot in the world at a moment's notice, cloud-native applications can be deployed rapidly across various environments. Resources (both compute and storage), APIs, health and performance instrumentation and management, etc. can be scaled up to meet increased demand or scaled down when demand wanes, much like adjusting, deploying, or redeploying military formations based on the operational need. Self-service capabilities, resource management, and automation of security controls can help organizations to leverage existing and even recapitalize legacy hardware to meet demands.
2. Resiliency and Redundancy: Military operations often require backup plans and contingencies. Similarly, cloud-native architectures are designed with failure in mind. They can withstand and recover from infrastructure failures, just as a military unit can continue its mission even if some assets are compromised. Cloud-native architectures and modern solutions effectively decouple the software architectures and the hardware, effectively abstracting away the dependencies such as "Application A needs to be directly operated on the dedicated hardware configuration XYZ v1.2". Instead, containerized applications, Kubernetes, Hyperconverged infrastructure orchestration, and lightweight solutions allow for the facilitating workloads on individual miniPCs or bare metal, and/or cloud at the same time. If a C2 (command and control) software system of systems is targeted and struck during distributed military operations, containers allow for rapid redeployment and automated re-initializing of that capability across hardware to get this back and operational faster.
3. Continuous Improvement: Cloud-native allows for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) of software, akin to a military doctrine of continuous training and improvement. For data/MLOps, this means architecting your data and algorithm pipelines to quickly develop, test, train, and re-engineer algorithms and data sets. Cloud-native, regardless of the actual underlying infrastructure is predicated on making rapid updates and the delivery of new capabilities as harmless and fast as possible. This means that new features, updates, and patches can be rolled out quickly and frequently, ensuring that the systems are always at peak performance and secure against emerging threats.
4. Resource Efficiency: Military operations aim to use resources wisely, avoiding waste. Cloud-native technologies such as containers and microservices make better use of hardware, running only what is needed and when, thus reducing costs and increasing efficiency. However, this is only true if orchestrated properly - this can also be a major unexpected cost sink if things aren't killed off after being used. Cloud-native solutions also allow for the decoupling of hardware/compute resources and the software consuming them. This presents an incredible opportunity to extend the lifespan of "legacy" hardware - repurposing it to continue serving a purpose as "surge" capacity.
5. Automation: Just as drones and autonomous vehicles can take on tasks without direct human control, cloud-native environments heavily rely on automation for routine and complex tasks. This frees up human resources to focus on more strategic initiatives. Security validation, quality assurance, interoperability, infrastructure orchestration, software update deployment, failed software rollback, application and cluster performance monitoring, and more are traditional ITSM Service Desk tasks that cloud-native supports as a force multiplier.

Application to Data Center Operations

In data center operations, agility translates to being able to meet the needs of the organization quickly and effectively. With a cloud-native approach, applications can be updated or rolled back without significant downtime. This means that data center operations can keep pace with the needs of the business, providing services and capabilities that are always aligned with current demands.

Furthermore, the automated and orchestrated nature of cloud-native environments means that operational tasks such as provisioning, scaling, and managing applications and services can be done with minimal manual intervention. This increases the speed at which these tasks can be completed and reduces the potential for human error.

Conclusion

For a non-technical senior leader, it's important to recognize that a cloud-native approach does for data center operations what modern, adaptive tactics do for military effectiveness: it enhances responsiveness, reduces exposure to risk, and optimizes the use of resources. In an era where the pace of change is ever-increasing, and the need for secure, reliable data services is critical, adopting cloud-native principles is a strategic imperative for maintaining operational superiority. It has been demonstrated as fundamentally transforming the anticipated timelines for fielding new software-defined capabilities to weapon systems.