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I spent last week in Barcelona at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation European conferences devoted to all things cloud native. The size of the show doubled since last year, as the concepts the foundation espouses have begun to find mainstream developer adoption. It’s about time that MSPs should get on board, or at least learn more about it.

Cloud native is a set of technologies and a development philosophy. The technology is built on the notion of launching software in containers, breaking that software down into small pieces called micro services, orchestrating the delivery of those containers with Kubernetes, and delivering the software on a regular basis.

If you’re still with me, the philosophy is this idea of building your software using the tools outlined above in such a way that you can move your applications from cloud to cloud, or even on prem, without having to rewrite the code. This application portability is a key feature of cloud native.

As companies move to these modern ways of developing software, they are going to be looking to MSPs for guidance and support (or even to develop the software for them). Whatever the case, MSPs need to be aware of these techniques and methodologies.

Get educated

The best thing you can do with any new set of technologies is become familiar with them. One way to do that is to attend conferences, like the one I did last week. There will be a similar one in November in San Diego (in case you need an excuse to go to San Diego). It’s about more than the location — it’s the workshops, vendors, and group of highly knowledgeable people all in one place to help you understand and get going with these concepts.

The vendors in particular can help you get started much faster than you could by downloading the raw open source projects that make up the cloud native universe. You could do that of course, assuming you had the personnel and the time, but it is probably easier to work with packaged tool sets, designed to be more usable out of the box.

Companies you would expect like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, VMware, and Red Hat, as well as a host of smaller startups, have put together packages to make it easier to get started with these technologies.

The key thing to remember is that with any new technology, you need to understand it (to the extent that you can) and incorporate the techniques where it makes sense to do so. You know your clients and your business best, but you also don’t want to hang on to older ways of doing things for too long and risk getting left behind. It’s always a good idea to be looking ahead at what’s coming next, and cloud native is probably something you consider.

Photo: Rob Bates / Unsplash


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Ron Miller

Posted by Ron Miller

Ron Miller is a freelance technology reporter and blogger. He is contributing editor at EContent Magazine and enterprise reporter at TechCrunch.

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