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Is the Enterprise Ready for Google's Cloud Native Approach?

This article is more than 8 years old.

For many years now, IT conferences around the world have had keynote speakers asking why Enterprise IT organizations didn’t operate more like Google . The line of questioning was based on the premise that Google moves quickly and creates services that end-users love, so why wouldn’t an Enterprise CIO want to emulate those characteristics for their business? It’s a valid question to ask, given the approval rating of many CIOs is near 40% and their leadership believes IT moves too slowly for the business.

But until last week, it was nearly impossible for Enterprise IT organizations to get the core technologies from Google into their own data centers. They could easily use services such as Gmail or Google Apps, but it rarely ran their most critical or differentiated applications. That all changed last week, as Google announced the formation of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and the release of their Kubernetes software as open-source for the open community.

This is big news for a number of reasons. At the macro-level, the IT industry is at the beginning of the biggest shift since the PC replaced the mainframe. This new era, defined by Cloud Computing and Open Source Software, is radically moving technology from being productivity-focused to creating new business models for companies.

Software is eating the world and it’s becoming imperative for software to become core strength in any competitive business, or else they can expect to join the ranks of Blockbuster, Circuit City and Kodak in the history books of companies that failed to recognize market transitions. The applications being built for this new area are optimized for mobile devices and are driven by real-time data. Netflix , Pinterest, Uber, Square, AirBnB and Apple ’s Healthkit are revolutionizing industries once thought to be slow moving or burden by regulation. As truly digital businesses, the lines between their business and their technology are blurred and intertwined. These companies are all “cloud native” in their business models and the technology they use is at the core of this Cloud Native movement.

This brings us back to Google’s announcement of CNCF and Kubernetes. Many Enterprise IT organizations run their data center applications on top of virtualization technology from VMware. In contrast, Google uses a more lightweight and agile technology called “containers”. Containers are an embedded piece of technology within the Linux operating system. It has recently been stealing the headlines as container pioneer Docker has taken $162M in VC funding and had their free container software (also called “Docker”) downloaded over 500M times in the last year.

At Google, each of the distributed applications runs in a container. Each week, Google uses two billion containers to keep their army of applications running to answer searches, send email, provide mapping directions and 1000s of other number crunching tasks. To manage all of these containers, Google created a highly automated system to ensure that all of the applications ran efficiently. That system was called “Borg” within Google, and Kubernetes is the commercial and open source version of that system.  The ability for any IT organization to emulate Google technology is now a possibility. Google is even partnering with a number of companies to help Enterprise IT buy this new, cloud native approach as a packaged offering with hardware and software.

Does this mean that those conference keynotes will stop asking why more companies don’t run like Google and CIO will begin lining up with checkbooks in-hand?

Not just yet!

As I mentioned above, this is the beginning of a complete re-imagining of the technology and economics of the IT industry. This concept of Cloud Native means that the applications will be different, the underlying hardware and software will be different, and the consumption model has potentially different economics than years past. The companies leading this change – Docker, CoreOS, Hashicorp, Pivotal and even Amazon Web Services (AWS) - are much smaller than existing industry giants or aren’t well known to Enterprise IT. Additionally, open source communities drive their core technologies, so the innovation model is being flipped on its head. It will take time for all of this infrastructure, as well as the mobile-data applications, to mature before we see broad market acceptance. But the foundation for the new Cloud Native era is being put in place, and it’s moving faster than we’ve ever seen the IT industry evolve in the past.

With the pace of change happening so fast, I expect that every Enterprise CIO will be asking themself one question, “How do I get there from here?”

Follow me on Twitter @furrier or @theCUBE

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