Cloud-Native Comes Down to Earth 1

If there is one given in technology, it’s that everything follows a similar life cycle – a path of adoption, if you will. Research firm Gartner calls it the “Hype Cycle,” with five phases to track a technology’s maturity and future potential (my favorite phase name is the ‘Trough of Disillusionment’), and whether we’re discussing flash storage or cybersecurity, edge computing or machine learning, it’s a sure bet each of these technologies has traveled down the same path.

It seems cloud-native is poised to enter the mainstream, largely thanks to generative AI. The overall adoption rate for cloud-native technologies appeared stuck for a long time, as organizations faced the reality of spending a lot of time, effort, and money reworking their IT environments to accommodate cloud-native technologies.

The tide has turned, however, and more organizations are going cloud-native. A recent report from observability vendor Datadog finds more organizations are adopting serverless computing frameworks—46% today, up from 31% two years ago. Much of that increase is due to the increased use of AI and AI models built using container technologies; the survey also noted a marked increase in GPU-based compute, which is being used to “train ML and large language models (LLMs), perform inferences, and process large datasets,” according to the report.

As much as AI is influencing cloud-native adoption rates by being, it’s also exerting its influence by doing. Several vendors are increasingly infusing AI into their technologies to reduce the pain associated with moving to cloud-native. Of particular note are companies offering AI-based services that refactor internally developed code in a fraction of the time it takes developers to do so. That has long been a sticking point in the shift to serverless/cloud-native—rewriting the code developers created in-house to connect all their various platforms, which often meant hiring consultants and/or integrators to handle. Now, organizations can do the rewriting in-house faster and, most likely, more accurately.

As cloud-native continues its march to ubiquity, AI will continue to be a force in its adoption and use. 2024 should offer much in the way of AI-driven services and technologies designed to improve the user experience further, making it much more IT and developer-friendly. Once that occurs, the sky’s the limit on what cloud-native could achieve.