How do you evaluate and select the best cloud-native technologies and services for your IT needs and goals?

1 Understand your requirements

Before you start exploring the cloud-native landscape, you need to have a clear understanding of your business and technical requirements, such as your objectives, budget, timeline, performance, security, compliance, and user expectations. You also need to assess your current IT capabilities, such as your infrastructure, applications, data, skills, and processes, and identify the gaps and opportunities for improvement. This will help you define the scope and priorities of your cloud-native transformation and align them with your IT strategy.

2 Learn the cloud-native principles

Cloud-native technologies and services are based on a set of principles that enable them to deliver value and innovation faster and more reliably. These principles include microservices, which involve breaking down applications into small, independent, and loosely coupled services that communicate through APIs; containers, which are lightweight and portable units that can run on any environment; orchestration tools such as Kubernetes or Docker Swarm, which automate the management, scaling, networking, and coordination of containers; serverless computing, which abstracts away the underlying infrastructure; DevOps practices to enable continuous delivery; and observability to collect data from various sources to monitor and troubleshoot the health and performance of cloud-native systems.

3 Compare the cloud-native options

Once you have a solid grasp of your requirements and the cloud-native principles, you can start comparing the different cloud-native technologies and services available in the market. You can use various sources of information, such as vendor websites, blogs, whitepapers, case studies, reviews, ratings, forums, and podcasts, to learn about the features, benefits, drawbacks, and use cases of each option. You can also use frameworks, such as the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) landscape or the AWS Well-Architected Framework, to categorize and evaluate the cloud-native solutions according to their functionality, maturity, compatibility, and best practices.

4 Test and validate the cloud-native solutions

The next step is to test and validate the cloud-native technologies and services that meet your criteria and expectations. You can use various methods, such as demos, trials, proofs of concept, prototypes, benchmarks, and pilots, to experiment with the cloud-native solutions in a controlled and realistic environment. You can also use tools, such as load testing, performance testing, security testing, and chaos engineering, to simulate different scenarios and measure the outcomes and impacts of the cloud-native solutions on your IT systems and users. This will help you verify the feasibility, suitability, and reliability of the cloud-native solutions for your IT needs and goals.

5 Select and implement the cloud-native solutions

The final step is to select and implement the cloud-native technologies and services that best fit your IT needs and goals. You can use various criteria, such as cost, quality, scalability, availability, security, compatibility, support, and innovation, to rank and choose the cloud-native solutions that offer the most value and advantage for your IT projects. You can also use various strategies, such as incremental migration, hybrid deployment, or greenfield development, to adopt and integrate the cloud-native solutions into your IT architecture and processes. You can also use various tools, such as configuration management, infrastructure as code, continuous delivery, and observability, to automate and optimize the deployment and operation of the cloud-native solutions.