Majority of Apps Will Use Cloud-Native Development By 2023

Cloud-native development—apps built using containers that run on platforms like Kubernetes—is a fast-growing area. Cloud-native technology is vital for enabling the scalability and agility required for today’s digital transformation initiatives—even highly-regulated enterprises are now moving to adopt cloud-native tools including containers, microservices architecture and orchestrators like Kubernetes. By working with cloud-first infrastructure, engineers can elastically scale computing workloads and release new features quickly to respond to changing business dynamics.

And studies confirm that more and more companies are embracing cloud-native development—a report from Outsystems finds that 72% of respondents expect that most of their apps will be created using cloud-native development techniques by 2023. The report, conducted by Lucid, called Cloud-Native Development: Ready or Not? What IT Executives and Developers Say, also finds companies are actively using low-code platforms in their cloud-native development processes.

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Below, I’ll summarize the key findings of this study and connect them to surrounding cloud-native development trends. We’ll review some potential hurdles IT should anticipate as they work to manage new cloud-native infrastructure and highlight the major use cases for this emerging engineering paradigm.

Growing Interest In Cloud-Native

Cloud-native is nearing buzzword status. And although the majority of respondents anticipate embracing cloud-native app development in the near future, it turns out not all are not completely familiar with the concept. Slightly more than half (53%) of respondents only know a little or are somewhat familiar with cloud-native development.

The report, which separated groups into cloud-native leaders and laggards, found that 52% of cloud-native leaders say identifying the right tools and platforms is a challenge to cloud-native development. It may be that teams are spoiled for choice, confronted with many different tooling options for areas like configuration, persistent storage, service proxies, orchestration, CI/CD and other areas.

About half (51%) of cloud-native leaders say that architectural complexity is also a challenge to cloud-native development. This is likely because cloud-native components, such as containers and Kubernetes, inherently introduce additional complexity to achieve high availability and fault tolerance for container orchestration. This is becoming heightened as companies introduce multiple clusters and increase their cloud footprint across multiple providers.

Cloud-native operations must also be maintained. Other top challenges are related to keeping operations ongoing for cloud-native development. These hurdles include setting up the infrastructure, keeping tools and infrastructure up to date and raising funding for tools and platforms.

Cloud Architect: Top Sought-After Cloud-Native Role

And 41% of leaders also say that finding and hiring people with the required skills will be a challenge for cloud-native development. Of these roles, cloud architect ranked the highest in demand—77% of leaders say their company must hire new cloud architects to effectively implement cloud-native development.

This role is followed by backend developer (67%), full-stack developer (66%) and mobile developer (64%). Interestingly, the report leaves out roles you might expect involved in operating cloud-native infrastructures, such as DevOps engineer or site reliability engineer. It’s unclear whether these choices were provided or respondents simply didn’t check them as essential roles.

Use Cases and Benefits

To forecast how cloud-native development will be applied, it’s helpful to see trends for application use cases. Among these, use cases for customer-facing presences rank the highest—66% of cloud-native leaders say they plan to increase customer-facing applications.

Digital transformation of customer-facing portals, e-commerce, customer onboarding and other areas certainly increased throughout the pandemic and development has not slowed since. In addition to this area, 61% of leaders say they plan to increase production applications and 60% plan to increase production of HR/employee applications.

Using Low-Code in Cloud-Native Development

The report also surveyed respondents about their impression of low-code in cloud-native development. Low-code/no-code platforms aid users by providing a visual way to stitch together reusable components to create applications and workflows. As I’ve covered previously, low-code development has sustained interest throughout the last couple of years. And, according to the report, 76% say their organization will use low-code to build the majority of their applications by 2024.

Low-code, which has historically been turned to during times of talent shortages, presents an interesting proposition to potentially reduce the barrier to operating cloud-native tools. And according to the report, 72% of cloud-native development leaders already use low-code platforms today. More than half (60%) say low-code platforms are “very good” or “excellent” tools for cloud-native implementation.

Final Thoughts

Cloud-native components afford many positive benefits for the software development life cycle, including higher elasticity, scalability and reliability. For these reasons and more, organizations are increasing their use of cloud-native technologies—Gartner estimates that over 95% of apps will be deployed on cloud-native platforms by 2025.

Still, not all tech leaders are familiar with cloud-native. Would-be adopters must confront a lack of general awareness and other specific hurdles, such as choosing between infrastructure options and increased architectural complexity. To reduce the aforementioned complexity of cloud-native platforms, a high percentage of companies are abstracting capabilities with low-code.

Conducted by Lucid, the “Cloud-Native Development: Ready or Not? What IT Executives and Developers Say” surveyed 500 IT executives and developers globally in February 2022 with representation across industries. For more information, you can pick up a copy of the report here.