Choosing The Right Tools To Craft Your Cloud-Native Strategy

The digital landscape is constantly evolving, and businesses are rapidly adopting cloud-native practices to stay ahead. The worldwide public cloud computing market continues to grow and is expected to reach an estimated 675 billion U.S. dollars in 2024. Cloud-native development involves building and deploying applications specifically designed for the cloud environment, leveraging its inherent scalability, agility, and elasticity. However, embarking on this journey requires careful planning and the selection of the right tools to effectively execute your cloud-native strategy. 

This article will guide you through the key considerations and explore some of the essential tools within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) landscape, empowering you to build robust and efficient cloud-native applications.

Demystifying Cloud-Native Tool Selection: A Guide to Success

Choosing the right cloud-native tooling can feel like navigating a complex landscape. But by understanding common selection patterns and key considerations, you can empower your team to make informed decisions that set your project up for success. Let's look into the strategies that I have seen organizations are employing to confidently chart their path.

Beyond Familiarity: Selecting for Sustainability

While your team’s familiarity with a tool can be a starting point, successful teams look beyond comfort zones to choose with the future of the project in mind. Active development communities, measured by frequent contributions, become a strong indicator of a project's ongoing health and viability. This ensures that the tools you choose will evolve alongside your needs.

Regulations in Focus: Aligning Tools with Compliance

For organizations in heavily regulated industries, compliance is paramount. Certain tool combinations, like Kubernetes and Crossplane, can offer solutions for specific regulatory requirements such as “BaFin, Landesbankenvorgabenkatalog und BSI” or the Joint Statement from the Security in a Cloud Computing Environment, and managing infrastructure drift. Remember, aligning your tooling choices with compliance needs is crucial.

The largest bank in Portugal, Millennium bcp, were able to leverage the Crossplane project in tandem with Upbound in order to achieve shorter SLA times and prevent drift, all while staying compliant under banking regulations.

Prioritizing Relevance: What Matters Most Now?

Successful teams prioritize tools that address immediate needs. This often means focusing on solutions that empower developers, such as self-service interfaces for infrastructure management or security tools that fortify your cloud stack.

Building Flexibility: Embracing the Unknown

The cloud-native landscape is constantly evolving. Choosing tools with flexibility in mind is essential. Look for options that accommodate unforeseen use cases, like multi-account deployments or specific observability needs. Remember, your ideal toolset should adapt as your project grows.

Striking a Balance: Essential vs. Optional Features

Smart teams prioritize core functionalities while acknowledging the existence of non-critical features. These "nice-to-haves" can be addressed later, preventing the need for complete re-architecting down the line.

Compatibility: Building a Cohesive Ecosystem

Understanding how your chosen tools integrate is vital. Kubernetes, for instance, often plays a central role, while tools like ArgoCD and Flux seamlessly complement Crossplane and Upbound. However, consider potential trade-offs. Opting for a comprehensive solution like Cilium might necessitate replacing other tools, so weigh the benefits carefully.

Contributing to the Future: Investing in Your Toolset

Consider your team's bandwidth for contributing to open-source projects you choose. Frequent contributions ensure the project remains viable and cater to your specific use cases. When prohibited from directly contributing to an open source project by your organization, it is ok to explore options like private forks with internal contributions, although this should not be your first choice. Paying back to the community is the way to go, and consider and properly plan for the upkeep involved.

Open Source vs. Commercial: Finding the Right Fit

Don't be afraid to explore commercial offerings built on open-source projects. These solutions often provide enterprise-grade features, support, and streamlined day-to-day operations – all while remaining rooted in the cloud-native ecosystem.
By adopting these strategies, you can equip your team to make informed decisions during the cloud-native tool selection process. Remember, the "right" tools are those that empower your team, align with your project's goals, and enable you to navigate the ever-changing landscape of cloud-native technologies.

Upbound: An Enterprise Choice for Cloud-Native Success

Now that we have illuminated tool selection criteria, let’s make an example. The CNCF Crossplane project is actively maintained and it enjoys a growing number of currently 243 contributors. The project is in incubating status and has over 9,000 github stars. Crossplane helps with inferring governance, compliance and corporate guidance. It is flexible and plays nicely with a broad range of cloud and other providers, and it has mechanisms for writing custom functions and interfacing with literally any external system where resource lifecycle management orchestration is of value. Crossplane is also the foundation of a commercial offering. More about it below.

Building and managing a robust cloud-native environment often requires more than just tools.

Upbound, the company behind Crossplane, offers a comprehensive platform that goes beyond simply providing Crossplane. Upbound, the flagship product named after the company, is a SaaS solution built on top of Crossplane, designed to simplify the process of building and managing internal APIs for enterprises. 

How Upbound Empowers Your Cloud-Native Journey

First Run Experience: Upbound aims to provide a smooth first run experience. Users do not need to allocate Kubernetes management clusters for their control planes, and they can readily run example reference architecture configurations from Upbound’s marketplace to get familiar with cloud resource creation and state reconciliation.

Security & SSO: Upbound prioritizes security by offering role-based access control and Single Sign-On (SSO) administrative management console access. Only authorized users can access specific spaces, control planes and custom APIs.

Disaster Recovery: Disaster recovery is crucial for business continuity. Upbound offers disaster recovery features to ensure your internal APIs remain available in case of unforeseen disruptions.

Reduced Day 2 Operations Burden: Upbound automates many day-2 operations tasks, freeing up your IT team to focus on more strategic initiatives, by monitoring the health of Crossplane control planes and management clusters, performing routine maintenance, and resolving component failures, and transparently communicating Upbound status.

Scalability: Upbound scales to meet the demands of your organization, regardless of the number of internal APIs or users you have. It does this by supporting many control planes in connected and self-hosted spaces.