There is so much jargon surrounding the cloud-native world these days that the developer community’s DZone took the time to capture a great deal of it. That’s what a landscape with $66 billion in funding and a total market capitalization of more than $17 trillion will bring.

There is containerization, microservices, continuous deployment and delivery. Not to be left out are fault tolerance, scalability and elasticity, wrapped into cloud service models such as infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and the ever-popular software as a service. The last decade was about choosing categories and places for cloud. The next decade will be about leveraging the innovation and services in a broad cloud native ecosystem.

Beyond the lazy shorthand of cloud native is an important reality that this vibrant and well-funded ecosystem will power the cloud journey for the next decade. Services from the hyperscalers combined with cloud-native tools will set the future information technology direction for many enterprises.

“Cloud native is more about the way you use cloud, not necessarily about the cloud services themselves,” said Joep Piscaer (pictured), independent content creator and analyst at TLA Tech. “It’s using those services available to you in a way organizationally and culturally that makes sense to go wherever you need to go.”

Piscaer spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, in the debut episode of Cloud Native Insights, a regular series that focuses on transitions in the marketplace and how companies are making the journey to modernize and leverage cloud-native technologies. They discussed the role of key organizations behind cloud native, contributions of developers to new business models, coexistence with large cloud vendors, a major project for a large European company and the value of speed in future software deployments.

The landscape of cloud native

A foundation and company have been central to cloud native development and the tools which surround it. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation or CNCF defines cloud native as scalable applications running in modern, dynamic environments using containers and declarative APIs. One example of a cloud-native development company is HashiCorp, which provides open-source tools and commercial products for developers. One of its core products is Terraform, an open-source infrastructure-as-code software tool.

“HashiCorp offers an adjacent approach to what the CNCF is doing,” Piscaer said. “It doesn’t actually matter what tool you use even though it will make me happy just to play around with them. But those new tools have to mean something, they have to solve a particular problem you have, either in speed of delivery or consistency of delivery, quality or service.”

The tools surrounding cloud native are creating an important shift in how developers contribute to the business. Cloud-native software development departs from the process of crafting monolithic applications for specific information technology tasks and focuses on broader ways to leverage cloud environments. And those cloud environments have become central to running the business itself.

“If you use Terraform and get the potential out of it, it will allow you to release software more quickly because you are able to stand up infrastructure for that software more quickly,” Piscaer explained. “We’ve shifted from being in the attic or basement doing IT stuff that no one understands or perceives the business value of it, into a realm of deploying faster and then we have an advantage in the marketplace. That’s what CNCF is doing, that’s what HashiCorp is helping build.”

Selling DevOps

However, in the competitive landscape of enterprise cloud computing, there are plenty of large players offering tools and services designed to entice developers into the same kinds of solutions being pursued by CNCF and HashiCorp. The model is not a secret: Start with free open-source tooling and then move into the enterprise space to solve critical issues.

“That’s what the cloud vendors will do as well, they kick start you with a free service and then move you up into their stack,” Piscaer said. “That’s where cloud native is kind of risky because the landscape is so fragmented, this tool solves my use case but this one doesn’t. You cannot buy DevOps, but the vendors will sure try to sell it to you.”

One of the projects which Piscaer has guided was the launch of a technical campus for Jumbo, the second-largest Dutch supermarket chain. Founded in 1921, Jumbo today has 60,000 employees and 600 stores throughout the Netherlands.

Launched two years ago, Jumbo’s technical campus houses more than 100 developers who work to improve the supermarket chain’s digital applications in support of its extensive e-commerce platform. For Piscaer, it was a lesson in how cloud native could be leveraged in a way that would make a direct contribution to the value of the business.

“We worked on getting them to a place where they could, in smaller teams, deploy software faster, more often, and in a safer way,” Piscaer said. “Teams could work independently of each other, work on adding business value. Cloud native means using that to the fullest extent.”

Faster delivery

Faster deployment of software is a key element behind the value offered by cloud native. The managed Kubernetes market is expanding the universe of tools which contribute solutions in this regard.

This includes vendors such as Platform 9, with its stated mission to deliver the “experience of the public cloud, on any infrastructure, for any enterprise, at any scale.” In an increasingly multicloud world, this kind of flexibility becomes more important, as will serverless, an integral part of CNCF’s cloud-native landscape.

“Companies that build a managed Kubernetes service, Platform 9, those kinds of companies will help a given customer to speed up their delivery and not care about the underlying infrastructure anymore,” Piscaer said. “It boils a lot of the discussion down into friction. How much effort does it take to start using something? That’s what this is all about to me, that is what cloud native means.”

Speed, quality, less friction and business value: If there is a new jargon surrounding cloud native, that may well be it.

“We no longer need hardcore engineering to use IT to move the needle forward,” Piscaer said. “That’s what I love about the cloud-native movement.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of a new regular Cloud Native Insights series and one of many CUBE Conversations from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:

Photo: SiliconANGLE