The Path from Cloud Naïve to Cloud Native

In this episode of Cloud Talk, Rackspace Technology’s Taylor Bird, Vice President, AWS Solutions, and Myles Anderson, Rackspace Technology’s Vice President, AWS Professional Services, drop by to share what they’ve learned about cloud native transformation during careers in cloud that began before it was called cloud.

There are many, many ways to answer the question, “How do I become cloud native?” but the first answer that typically comes to mind – technology – is also the wrong one.

As a discipline, cloud native development strikes to the heart of cloud computing’s ultimate promise. That is, to allow companies to forget about the infrastructure on which their applications run and put all their energy into solving customer and user challenges.

That means shifting organizational thinking from infrastructure and servers, and IT in general, to creating applications that, according to Bird, are solely defined by the business problems they solve.

To enable this, and to best leverage all of the hyperscale technology that makes cloud native development possible, Bird underscores the need for IT leaders to build teams with vision and capabilities that extend “beyond building software to run in a certain place or to  a specific cost.”

Listen in as Bird and Anderson, along with Cloud Talk's host, Jeff DeVerter, take a deep dive into the journey to cloud native and the key mindsets and processes leadership must adopt to be successful, including:

• The importance of understanding the destination before setting out on the journey
• How traditional operating models quickly and inevitably breakdown when their value streams are mapped to cloud native processes
• The importance of building what Amazon calls “two pizza teams,” which are completely enabled to move projects from inception of customer need through to delivery – and what that means for organizational structure
• The many different ways that pilot projects and teams can be assembled to drive a “city on a hill” approach to cloud native development, first proving its function then scaling it as capabilities grow
• Real-world stories of companies that have overcome significant organizational obstacles to thrive with cloud native application development