The IT industry loves buzzwords – including buzzwords whose exact meaning is hard to pin down, but which get tossed around constantly nonetheless. Case in point: Cloud-native. For nearly a decade, cloud-native has been one of the most buzzworthy terms in tech. It’s also, arguably, one of the most misused and misunderstood. In many cases, solutions that claim to be cloud-native are actually not. They’re merely cloud-compatible.
To prove the point, let’s explore what cloud-native means, what does and doesn’t count as cloud-native, and why embracing tools and techniques that are truly cloud-native has become so critical for business success today.
We’ll ground the discussion by focusing on the technology domain that we here at N2W know best: Cloud-native backup and recovery. As we explain, not every backup tool or service that supports the cloud or runs in the cloud is actually cloud-native – but those backup and recovery solutions that do truly qualify as cloud-native deliver critical advantages for protecting data effectively in the increasingly complex digital landscape that businesses face today.
What does cloud-native really mean?
The term cloud-native gained prominence starting in 2015 with the launch of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), a Linux Foundation project that promotes open source cloud-native technology.
According to the official definition from the CNCF – which we think is well-qualified to define cloud-native because it is, after all, the organization that popularized the concept – cloud-native means “loosely coupled systems that interoperate in a manner that is secure, resilient, manageable, sustainable, and observable.” By this definition, technologies like containers and serverless functions, and software development techniques like API-first design, qualify as cloud native.
However, not everything that runs in the cloud is cloud-native. A monolithic application that you lift-and-shift from an on-prem server into a cloud VM isn’t cloud-native because it’s not loosely coupled. Nor is it especially resilient, sustainable, or observable. It’s just an app hosted in the cloud, using the same design paradigms that have predominated in on-prem environments for decades.
Therein lies much of the confusion surrounding what cloud-native means. Too often, people assume that anything that is cloud-based is cloud-native. In reality, it’s only applications that take full advantage of scalable, modular cloud architectures and services that meet the true definition of cloud-native.
Cloud vs. cloud-native backup and recovery
To illustrate this point from a real-world perspective, let’s consider the differences between cloud data backup and recovery tools in general and those that are truly cloud-native.
Today, virtually all commercial data protection software is compatible with the cloud. It can collect data from cloud-based applications, databases, and storage buckets and back it up. It can also often restore data directly to the same types of cloud services and environments from which it collects backup data.
But these features alone don’t make data protection tools cloud-native. They just make them cloud-compatible.
True cloud-native data backup and recovery tools do more than just collect and restore data from cloud workloads. They offer features like the following, which are the critical differentiators between cloud data protection and cloud-native data protection.
Agentless backup and recovery
Traditional cloud backup and recovery tools use agent-based architectures. This means that they deploy software agents to run alongside the workloads they back up. Typically, the agents collect data and forward it to backup tools.
This approach is effective for backing up data, but it comes with some downsides – such as the operational complexity of having to deploy backup agents alongside each workload you want to protect, as well as the CPU and memory that the agents consume.
To avoid these pitfalls, cloud-native backup and recovery tools support an agentless approach. Agentless backup makes it possible to collect data using methods like API requests, without requiring software to run directly alongside each workload. An agentless approach enables much more efficient data backup. It also scales more effectively because it makes it possible to begin backing up new cloud services or workloads immediately, without having to deploy agents to them first – a critical advantage in constantly changing cloud environments.
API-based backup
In a similar vein, cloud-native backup solutions don’t rely on the backup vendor’s proprietary software tools or protocols to collect backup data. Instead, they integrate natively with the APIs of the cloud platform they are protecting.
This is important because it minimizes resource overhead, since there is no need to implement special API calls to collect data. It also makes it possible to back up virtually any type of cloud service or workload in a uniform way. Whether you need to protect block storage volumes, object storage buckets, container file systems or virtually anything else, API-based backup has you covered because it leverages the core APIs that are built into your cloud platform.
Full data control
With cloud-native backup, you retain complete control over your data. You don’t have to send it to a storage platform or app controlled by a third-party vendor. Instead, using the agentless, API-based backup techniques described above, you can back up and manage data on your terms.
These capabilities can help to meet data privacy and compliance needs. They also reduce your dependency on specific data protection vendors to ensure that your data will actually be recoverable.
Intelligent backup
Conventional approaches to data backup – including in cloud environments – involved backing up data folder-by-folder and file-by-file. This is one way to back up your data, but it takes forever, especially if you have large volumes of data to protect.
A cloud-native approach to data protection uses more intelligent data backup techniques. Instead of iterating through data repositories and backing up objects in the order they’re discovered, cloud-native tools make it possible to prioritize some resources over others. In addition, they offer features like incremental backup, which copies only data that has changed since the last backup – leading to a dramatic boost in efficiency.
Cloud network backup
Restoring data quickly in the cloud often requires more than simply rebuilding or repopulating databases, storage volumes and so on. You must also be able to recover the network settings that allow your cloud workloads to interface with each other and the Internet at large.
To this end, backing up cloud network settings is another important facet of cloud-native backup. When you can recover your network configuration as well as your data, you can get back up and running much faster.
Cross-account data protection
Another challenge that can delay data recovery efforts is the need to restore workloads that were originally owned by one cloud account using a different account. Doing so can be useful if, for example, your main cloud account was compromised.
This is why cross-account backup and recovery is critical for enabling a truly cloud-native approach to data protection. Cross-account protection provides the flexibility to recover data quickly to a different account without having to copy it into the new account environment manually or adjust configuration settings by hand.
Cross-cloud backup
Along similar lines, cross-cloud backup is another cloud-native backup and recovery feature that can supercharge your ability to restore data quickly. Cross-cloud backup is the ability to take data or workloads that originally lived in one cloud and restore them on an entirely different cloud. This is useful in scenarios where your original cloud platform fails.
Here again, traditional cloud backup solutions would require extensive manual effort if you wanted to restore data from one cloud to a different cloud platform. But cross-cloud backup and recovery automates the process so that you can restore operations quickly even if your entire primary cloud platform has gone down.
The future is cloud-native
To be sure, traditional cloud workloads and cloud management techniques won’t go away anytime soon. Updating workloads to use loosely coupled architectures and taking full advantage of highly scalable cloud services requires significant time and effort. Many businesses will continue to operate non-cloud native workloads (even those that reside in the cloud) for the foreseeable future.
Still, there’s no denying that if you want your workloads to be as scalable, efficient, and reliable as possible, you need to embrace cloud-native wherever possible. Traditional cloud architectures and deployment strategies offer some value, but cloud-native offers much more. Cloud-native is the only way to operate scalably and seamlessly no matter how many clouds, cloud services, or cloud accounts you have to contend with.
Cloud-native and traditional cloud can coexist
Note, by the way, that one of the great things cloud-native computing is that it’s not an all-or-nothing affair. You can adopt cloud-native techniques where they make sense, while still using a more traditional approach to the cloud elsewhere.
For example, if you have legacy workloads that don’t support agentless backup, you can always deploy backup agents to accommodate them, while simultaneously using agentless backup for other workloads. Similarly, if you want to take full backups rather than incremental backups for some resources, there’s nothing to stop you.
Cloud-native is all about flexibility and choice, including the choice not to use cloud-native when a traditional approach makes more sense.
The bottom line: Despite the looseness with which some folks conflate terms like cloud and cloud-native, there are critical differences between software that supports the cloud in general, and software that is truly cloud-native. Understanding the difference is critical for maximizing your business’s ability to benefit from the cloud.
To learn more about N2W’s approach to data protection and what makes it a truly cloud-native solution, request a demo.
Chris Tozzi
Chris, who has worked as a journalist and Linux systems administrator, is a freelance writer specializing in areas such as DevOps, cybersecurity, cloud computing, and AI and machine learning. He is also an adviser for Fixate IO, an adjunct research adviser for IDC, and a professor of IT and society at a polytechnic university in upstate New York.
