Migrating to Cloud-Native Application Architectures

Chapter 2. Changes Needed

All we are doing is looking at the timeline from the moment a customer gives us an order to the point when we collect the cash. And we are reducing that timeline by removing the nonvalue-added wastes.

Taichi Ohno

Taichi Ohno is widely recognized as the Father of Lean Manufacturing. Although the practices of lean manufacturing often don’t translate perfectly into the world of software development, the principles normally do. These principles can guide us well in seeking out the changes necessary for a typical enterprise IT organization to adopt cloud-native application architectures, and to embrace the cultural and organizational transformations that are part of this shift.

Cultural Change

A great deal of the changes necessary for enterprise IT shops to adopt cloud-native architectures will not be technical at all. They will be cultural and organizational changes that revolve around eliminating structures, processes, and activities that create waste. In this section we’ll examine the necessary cultural shifts.

From Silos to DevOps

Enterprise IT has typically been organized into many of the following silos:

• Software development

• Quality assurance

• Database administration

• System administration

• IT operations

• Release management

• Project management

These silos were created in order to allow those that understand a given specialty to manage and direct those that perform the work of that specialty. These silos often have different management ...