Presentation: Are We Really Cloud-Native?

I have a pretty broad role at Luminis where I'm both in the leadership team but also a trusted adviser to some of my customers. My technical backgrounds is both in Java and cloud technologies. I consider myself to be a Java and cloud postmodernist. I've been around long enough with Java, I've used the first bits that actually hit the Internet, the applets. I've seen the classical use of Java, I've seen the more modern use, and nowadays, especially in the cloud age there's what I like to call the postmodernist use of Java. This is what I'd like to talk about to customers and to my colleagues and to people attending conferences all over the place.

I think that using the cloud is typically not very new to most people nowadays. It has been around for like 10-15 years now, although I see a lot of my customers now turning to the cloud for real. They ran some experiments with it, they tried it out a few years ago but mostly for some of the wrong reasons. They thought they could use it to do cost savings. Now, especially with all of the analyst reports writing about how cloud is going to eat up mainstream application development, they turn to the  cloud for real. But then I see them still using it as a virtualization platform and I think the modern cloud is much more than that and that's what I try to educate people on.

I think the ideal attendee in this case is going to be someone with a lot of Java mileage under their belt. Maybe also some experience on the clouds, maybe wondering why it's so hard to do cloud native right. I think that will be the best fit. On the other hand, I have been doing similar talks like this before on microservices for example where  I also tend to talk to the occasional I.T. manager or architect.

Most of the things that I will be talking about are based on some real-life experience that we have, either at our own  company or at some of our customers. Although a lot of the topics which are part of this cloud native journey are not really new in terms of when they were coined, DevOps, microservices, etc., we've been talking about these things for years, I think doing them right is surprisingly hard still. What I'm aiming for is to give them some real-life insights into some of our projects and some of my customers' projects and what we've learned from that with regards to the cloud native journey.

If you look at skillset and experience, for example, a few years ago when we were still doing typical mainstream development, maybe 70 to 80% of your time as a Java developer was about writing Java. Nowadays in cloud projects we see that if you're part of a DevOps team, there are so many other responsibilities and skills that are required of you that maybe you only spend like 30% of your time writing actual Java code, and this means that especially in terms of the skills that you need to master in order to do this right, there's a lot that's going to be asked from Java developers.

Yeah, well they're spaces where Java will excel in the cloud, and there are spaces where you see lots of other languages. We'll talk about that too.