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Oracle Corporation
Cloud Native: The Answer to Delivering Services 4.0 in Singapore
Robert Shimp
In Singapore, the shifts in technology trends are impacting the future of the service industry that accounts for 72 per cent of Singapore’s GDP. As a result, Services 4.0 – identified through the Services and Digital Economy Technology Roadmap (SDE TRM) as a potential growth engine for Singapore’s digital economy – aims to deliver next-generation services that are end-to-end, frictionless, empathic, and anticipatory to customer needs.
In order to elevate the service industry, cloud computing has become an invaluable means to accelerate change. This is all thanks to the benefits cloud computing offers: new business value, better solutions, and business expansion.
Now cloud providers are introducing new ‘cloud native computing’ services to offer even more dynamic application development. Cloud native technologies are characterised by the use of containers, microservices, serverless functions, development pipelines, and infrastructure expressed as code. With this new technology, cloud application developers are able to be more agile and efficient even as it reduces deployment cost and increases cloud vendor independence.
As Mr. S Iswaran, Minister for Communications and Information, put it at Singapore Digital Industry Day 2018, “Cloud Native Architecture is not just about shifting a company’s on-premise resources onto Cloud. More fundamentally, Cloud Native Architecture is a way to build and run applications on the cloud with flexible modular components, allowing companies to amend their applications quickly, and to scale up or down as required.”
The cloud-native world inertia
Despite being intrigued by the hype around cloud migration, many enterprises are also feeling overwhelmed by the rapidly changing cloud native technology landscape and aren’t sure how to proceed. While cloud native computing has demonstrated success among early adopters, harnessing this technology has posed a challenge for many mainstream businesses.
Cloud native architecture is not just about shifting a company’s on-premise resources onto cloud
There are several ways that an enterprise can bring cloud native computing on board. One option is to build their own cloud native environment from open source software. However, once a software stack is selected, the business will need to staff and train hard-to-find talent to provide in-house support.
This can be an expensive and risky way to adopt new technology.
A second option is to contract with a software vendor to provide a complete cloud native solution.
However, this compromises the freedom to choose the best open source technologies in exchange for better vendor support, not to mention the added perils of a closed contract.
This struggle can be resolved by using a technology provider that offers the best of both worlds - delivering standards-based, off-the-shelf open source software with integration, testing, and enterprise-class support for the entire software stack.
Technology providers look to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to define an open standard cloud native software framework. CNCF uses industry experts to evaluate the maturity, quality, and security of cloud-native open source projects, and give guidance on which are ready for enterprise use. Selected cloud-native technologies cover the entire scope of containers, microservices, continuous integration, server-less functions, analytics, and much more.
Once these cloud-native open source projects have been declared ‘graduated’ by CNCF, those projects can confidently be incorporated into an enterprise’s cloud native strategy with the knowledge that they are high quality, mainstream technologies that will get industry-wide support.
That said, adopting CNCF’s rich cloud native technology framework is only half the battle. Businesses must also choose a technology provider that will package these CNCF-endorsed technologies without proprietary extensions or other lock-ins, and provide the necessary integrations, testing, support, documentation, training, and more.
Order from Chaos
A well-designed software stack built to the CNCF guidelines and offered by a single vendor has many benefits. First, it reduces the risk of technology adoption. Second, it provides a single point of contact for rapid support resolution, which means faster time to market and higher customer satisfaction. Third, it helps make cloud native applications portable to any popular cloud. This flexibility can help enterprises improve their operating margin by reducing expenses and unlocking future revenue growth opportunities.
Cloud native computing is becoming an every-day part of mainstream cloud application development. Cloud native computing can also bolster the development of advanced applications powered by artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), internet of things (IoT), among others. The future is clear for the service industry in Singapore; it is set to be the transformative and disruptive push that will fuel the Singapore economy to greater heights.
