Forrester analysts see avoiding cloud-native technologies as a major pitfall to which enterprises fall victim while working toward cloud modernization.

"One of the first problems that people can make for themselves is postponing cloud-native technology," Forrester Principal Analyst Lee Sustar said during a webinar.

Kubernetes – the foundation for cloud-native applications – was developed by Google, but "not everybody has the scale and engineering resources of a multi-trillion dollar company like Google. So how could that possibly be relevant to me?" Sustar said, summarizing many enterprise fears around the complexity of cloud native in spite of the potential it brings.

Cloud-native technologies like serverless computing, for example, are usually in developers' toolkits as soon as they see what's available and how it can impact them. But with governance questions, especially around the shared responsibility model, "it can get very complicated very quickly," he said.

Despite the multiple good reasons companies may have to say "wait a minute," they shouldn't wait more than a minute, Sustar said. "What we're talking about here is the advent of cloud scale computing – literally, the same sort that hyperscalers take advantage of – put in your hands, [and] put to where you can actually make use of that," he explained.

Retail discovered the beauty of cloud-native development earliest on, Sustar said, citing lightweight retail applications facing consumers that had some interaction with internal data, but not an overwhelming amount. "They saw that they could see that same kind of scale," he said. "If Amazon.com can be a retailer, I can as well on some other platform or my own platform."

That led to systems of engagement moving their way back toward core IT systems, and the viability of that scale in mainstream corporations and government organizations has truly validated the cloud-native approach, Sustar explained.

While it might make sense to avoid moving to cloud-native architectures "until there's sufficient internal engagement and stakeholders and decisions about all the implications," he admitted, "procrastination really has got to go," he urged.

"There's been a sea change in IT infrastructure, [and] cloud is the baseline," Sustar said. "Therefore, it's time to move forward with that."

Procrastination at this stage in the game will only make the complication grow in nature as enterprises try to support aging legacy systems that are increasingly complex to maintain in operation, he noted.

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