This is part two of a four part series about Cloud Native vs Cloud Hosted.
In part one of this blog series, we looked at the basic differences between cloud native and cloud hosted models. In this part, I will be sharing some pros and cons of the two models as it relates to IT leaders.
As IT leaders, you are not just looking at designing the latest cool tech stack, delivering in rapid agile cycles and operating high availability and reliability. You are looking at creative ways to enable, innovate and drive value for the business. And, you need to do all these and more with less, while keeping lights on.
Here are some of my insights on how the two models can help you, deliver the most value for your business.
- Businesses look for instant disaster recovery and business continuity. Cloud native application are built to make this happen with no extra effort. Be it a storm or a fire, it will be business as usual with an in built redundancy. Hosted models provide this too, but it comes with a 2X investment in infrastructure and management from the hosting provider. You will have to switch over to a secondary replica in case of a disaster.
- Businesses like to manage transaction ebbs and flows seamlessly. Cloud native applications enable instant scale up/ down based on business seasonality and you pay for what you really use. But in hosted model, scale is built at a price. Extra infrastructure and maintenance are dedicated to a customer, which adds up to a heavy bill from the hosting provider. You don’t really pay for just what you use it is always more.
- How often have you been holding up business on upgrades. Remember your last costly and lengthy upgrade? With cloud native, upgrades are instantaneous, effortless and the users don’t even get to know that an upgrade has happened. It is just seamless. Hosting providers work on upgrades that are way too lengthy, problematic and disrupts the business more than you anticipate.
- And, who in IT does not like to have open, API based platform to build something new and cool? Cloud native applications provide a larger scope for innovation through API based platforms. Hosted providers tend to have you get stuck to a stack with a vendor lock-in which impedes productivity and innovation.
Learn more about how cloud native eases the burden on IT and hear what analysts say about IT value adds in a cloud native vs hosted model. Stay tuned for part 3 of the blog series to see how the models benefit Operations/Business stakeholders in your organization.
