In this post, I will discuss examples of companies that have adopted Cloud Native.
Major service providers like Netflix, Amazon and Uber have transformed their IT architectures to Cloud Native models. Many other companies are also attempting the shift.
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| Cloud Native Case Studies |
Ultimately, the accelerating pace of business and user demands necessitate greater agility and flexibility, driving transitions from restrictive legacy IT systems to Cloud Native. I briefly covered the concept, definition, components and characteristics of Cloud Native in previous posts - please refer to those for context.
1. Netflix
As Netflix subscribers grew exponentially worldwide, limitations of their legacy IT infrastructure became apparent:
- Slowing development velocity: The monolithic application architecture required modifications to interdependent code for any feature changes or additions.
- Data center sprawl: Continuous hardware expansions to support traffic growth resulted in ever-growing data centers.
- Service disruptions: With all services tied to a single database, risk of outages was high. A data center fire once paralyzed services for 3 days.
- Maintenance challenges: 24/7 global service made server maintenance downtime difficult to coordinate.
To overcome these constraints, Netflix redesigned their legacy on-prem data center infrastructure into a Cloud Native architecture over 7 years starting 2009.
Video streaming and other functions like data/logs, sign-on and content search, payments were incrementally shifted to AWS. In 2016, Netflix shut down their last data center to declare themselves a truly “Cloud Native company”.
Today, Netflix leverages AWS cloud infrastructure to reliably deliver high-quality video, enjoying benefits like high-availability, scalability and flexibility. Their organizational and open source-based technical transformations represent a successful paradigm shift.
2. Amazon
Amazon had been utilizing monolithic architecture-based systems which grew massive in scale alongside corporate growth, with ever-expanding databases. When attempting further catalog expansions, Amazon encountered difficulties due to limitations of legacy IT systems.
Issues arose like rigid, constrained IT infrastructure, tightly coupled and complex application architectures risking system failures, prolonged build/deploy cycles, and restrictive developer tools.
To address this, initiatives were launched to split up databases and adopt SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). However, build/deploy still took considerable time and persisting service bottlenecks from high inter-service dependencies remained. Fundamental improvements were imperative in this state where problems continued unresolved.
The SOA limits motivated a shift to MSA (Microservices Architecture). Autonomous teams owning services end-to-end were formed to encourage rapid innovation. Spanning planning, development, operations, security and databases, these DevOps teams enabled efficient cross-functional agility.
Today, Amazon runs thousands of services designed as MSA, powered by thousands of autonomous DevOps teams. CI/CD pipeline automation also facilitates rapid builds/deployments - averaging 6 per second!
3. Uber
Uber, the iconic mobile ride-sharing startup that pioneered the "sharing economy", experienced astronomical growth - cementing itself as an essential service across 700+ global cities in just 7 years. Consequently, its mobile app facilitated over 10 billion trips.
However, the monolithic legacy architecture underlying Uber’s meteoric rise was designed without scalability in mind. Initially, this posed no problems.
But exponential global expansions soon exposed limitations, with any feature releases requiring complete repackaging and collaborations strained on a framework managing all global engineering and ops.
Inflexible infrastructure management also became increasingly untenable.
In response, Uber transformed to a Cloud Native system, decomposing functionality into microservices.
In this post, I shared some examples of Cloud Native adoption. With digital transformations actively underway across industries, Cloud Native is being embraced by many enterprises seeking to meet accelerating market and customer changes through rapid, robust and continuous services. It will be exciting to see what new innovations emerge ahead.
