Cloud Native is more than a tool set. It is a full architecture, a philosophical approach for building applications that take full advantage of cloud computing. In this context, culture is how individuals in an organization interact, communicate, and work with each other.
In short, culture is the way your enterprise goes about creating and delivering your service or product. If you have the perfect set of cloud platform, tools, and techniques yet go about using them wrong—if you apply the right tools, only in the wrong culture—it’s simply not going to work. At best you’ll be functional but far from capturing the value that the system you’ve just built can deliver. At worst, that system simply won’t work at all.
The three major types of culture within enterprises are Waterfall, Agile, and Cloud Native. A quick primer:
Waterfall organizations are all about long-term planning. They deliver a large, solidly built and tested project bundling many separate services into one deployment every six months to one year (perhaps even longer) timeframe. They are risk-averse, with a long decision-making chain and rigid hierarchy. There are a lot of managers, including project managers. Waterfall organizations tend to have specialist teams handling very specific skills—security, testing, database administration, etc.
Agile organizations recognise the limitations imposed by monolithic long-term releases, and have adapted to deliver faster by using an iterative, feature-driven approach to releasing in two- to four-week ‘sprints’. Agile development breaks applications into their functional components, each of which is worked on, start to finish, by a single team.
Cloud Native organizations are built to take optimum advantage of functioning in cloud technologies (clouds will look quite different in the future, but we also build to anticipate this). Applications are built and deployed in a rapid cadence by small, dedicated feature teams made up of developers who also know how to build in networking, security, and all other necessities so all parts of the distributed system become part of the application.
Cultural awareness also grants the ability to start changing your organization from within, by a myriad of small steps all leading in the same direction. This allows you to evolve gradually and naturally alongside a rapidly changing world. ‘Long-term direction’ is literally the definition of strategy. So small steps towards this direction are strategic steps. Strategy is setting a long-term direction and taking steps on that direction.