The good news for software developers is that a cloud-native services delivery model is proving to be reliable and scalable by construction. However, it’s the construction part that still needs more work.

In the second installment of a series of interviews with thought leaders around “Demystifying Cloud Native,” Dominik Tornow (pictured), principal systems engineer at Cisco Systems Inc., offered a realistic assessment of the pros and cons surrounding cloud-native architectures and the challenges for developers in application deployment.

“You can easily scale up more component instances or, in case of failure, you can easily scale up replacements for them,” Tornow said. “You have to keep in mind, this does not come for free. You are throwing a few challenges the developer’s way. On a workload level, the challenge is now partial failure.”

Tornow spoke with Peter Burris (@plburris), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, in Palo Alto, California. They discussed the challenges developers face when moving to microservices and possible new tools to help detect issues earlier in the cloud-native process. (* Disclosure below.)

Making app development complex

The partial failure described by Tornow stems from moving to a microservices architecture where individual component instances run in their own processes and can communicate via an actual network. This helps facilitate scalability and reliability, according to Tornow, but the failure of one feature in a cluster might lead a developer to believe other elements were still working, thus increasing exposure on a number of levels.

“When we move to the network level, it actually looks even more bleak,” Tornow said. “Messages may get lost, messages may get duplicated, messages may experience latency. Unfortunately, there’s no way to reliably detect. We have to work around these terms, and this is what makes our application development very complex.”

Tools such as Istio, which can intelligently control the flow of traffic and application programming interface calls between services, could provide developers with solutions to address some of the cloud-native challenges.

“We do see emerging solutions in this space, like Istio and other services meshes,” Tornow said. “I do believe that cloud-native networking will show itself or define itself as a workload-to-workload connectivity. We still need to make a leap forward into a different kind of cloud-native networking.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Cisco Systems Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cisco nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE